Whatever happened to that George Jetson future we were all promised?
Where’s our jet car, pill food, 4 hour workday, and robot maid?
But it goes beyond that. Nuclear war, remember back in the 80s we were promised the big final knock down drag out final conflict between east and west and that the few of us left would most probably end up in a desert like nuclear wasteland with giant ants chasing us and wearing all black leather clothes and fighting over the last can of Hormel beans?
The trouble with imagining the future is that you can get so easily lost on one measly detail that you really miss the big picture. Verne and Wells understood this back at the beginning of the last century and took short hops into the future rather than huge leaps. They prognosticated using the technology of the day and teased that out slightly into the future to see what they could develop and for the most part they did rather well.
The tank, the submarine, the moon shot; pretty spot on. But when they tried to delve into the social sciences they kind of fell flat. If you go to any book store and look up these authors you will find all the familiar titles (20000 leagues under the sea, war of the worlds, from the earth to the moon, etc) but some of their more controversial works are pretty much unavailable.
Verne wrote “Paris in the 20th century” in 1863 but never published it as he found it too ridiculous. It basically is a dystopian view of modern society and may have been a precursor to 1984 if Orwell would have seen it.
Wells delved even deeper into this type of futuristic prognostication. He wrote “the world set free”, “the sleeper awakens” and of course “the time machine”. All commentaries on contemporary society and what he foresaw might happen if we continued on the current course and what he thought the correct course would be.
By themselves these are flops. But if we step back and look at the trends that they anticipate then maybe there is value in them. Trends such as a move to transnational government entities, increased regulation of the individual, and globalization. These are things that are actually happening. Maybe not as they foresaw and definitely not the ends that they hoped or feared would occur.
We have to be careful when we write the future that we are not allowing our inner fears and hopes to taint the work. Of course express your views in your work but always step back and look at critically and say is this what the future will really look like?
Recent Comments