The closer connection between fact and fiction has caused new concerns. New breakthroughs in science are usually hailed as wonderful and amazing, but often the technology is open to misuse. If our future is going to be an exciting hi-tech world, will this cause more problems than it solves? Science-fiction writers have taken different approaches to imagining the future; showing the dangers to the world we currently live in through allegory, or showing how our great dreams could become our worst nightmares in a few days, months, years or centuries.
Allegorical storytelling has become very popular in television science-fiction, with ‘Star Trek’ being a good example of this. Many of its stories take their ideas from problems we are currently facing, and ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ alone has dealt with racial and sexual prejudice, terrorism and religious beliefs in its television run. American television programmes are well known for their moralising, but as long as it isn’t too heavy handed, it can put a message across very clearly and effectively. The other ‘Star Trek’ series often do similar stories relating to 20th century social issues seen from the 23rd or 24th century; this idea is explored to some extent via national identity.
Possibly the greatest novel of warning has to be George Orwell’s masterwork, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Written in 1948, Orwell named the book by switching the last two digits of the year round. His vision was never designed to be the ‘real’ 1984, but a look at what the near-future could be like if the then-current political and social climate persisted. He took his cue from Jonathan Swift’s satirical works:
The book is still extremely popular today, as many of its ideas still hold true. Admittedly, Orwell’s vision was coloured by the recent end of World War II and the problems that remained, but this makes ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ a stronger book due to its pessimism. Its depressing ending only reinforces that the only way to escape this type of future is to never let it occur in the first place. It cannot be brought down by the public, as Winston demonstrates:
If the Nazis had won the war, Orwell’s totalitarian state could have come to pass, and in today’s more paranoid and conspiracy-happy environment, the world of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, with Big Brother maintaining total mind and body control over everyone, looks increasingly likely.
A fascinating glimpse of another near-future was seen in the film and following television series of ‘Alien Nation’. Set, like ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in a future a few years ahead, ‘Alien Nation’ showed a world where mankind has made its first contact with aliens. This race, called the Tenctonese, but known affectionately as ‘Newcomers’, and not so affectionately as ‘Slags’ have been trying for a few years to blend in with the human population. The series focuses solely on one city (Los Angeles) and the positions the Newcomers have reached in their short time on Earth. The beauty of the series is in the juxtaposition of the human and Newcomer behaviour, which is almost identical, with both groups having peaceful and antagonistic elements.
As the Newcomers are the subject of racial attacks, so they try to have an eye for an eye. This is further hampered by the presence of Overseers, who were in charge of the crashed Newcomer spaceship as it was full of slaves, and now want their workers returned to slavery. The sad aspect is that whatever ethnic group the humans come from, they finally lose their hatred of each other and band together to turn it full force on the Newcomers. However, the message is clearly shown without being too preachy. As the producer, Kenneth Johnson said:
‘Alien Nation’ doesn’t try to blind the viewer with advanced technology and heavy handed moralising; the only real change in its future is the presence of the aliens, but this highlights the problems we still have to overcome between ourselves before we can live peacefully with another race.
A slightly different look at human behaviour and our possible future can be seen in ‘Sliders’. In each episode, a group of four people use a wormhole to travel to a parallel Earth; “same planet, different dimension” as the inventor of sliding, Quinn Mallory, puts it. As is usual in these scenarios, the heroes are trying to find their way back home to their own Earth, Earth Prime, but they discover other worlds where (occasionally small) events have happened differently and the larger picture has changed. As the sliders do not travel in time, but in space, they (nearly) always see a similar Earth. It is an interesting look at what would happen if we were faced with a world where fire is sentient, where time moves slower than it does here, where dinosaurs never became extinct, and what effect this would have on how we live. Although many of these ideas are not likely to happen, others postulate a natural disaster and ask how we would combat things such as an asteroid large enough to destroy everything on Earth or a virus that could kill everyone in a matter of months. ‘Sliders’ uses the theory of ‘ripples’; every action creating a parallel universe where the reverse decision is played out, and how one event can change everything we know. One day, someone may make the wrong choice.
Concern about the future of our species often goes hand in hand with concern about the technology of the future. We are becoming more and more dependant on machines, and this could eventually go too far. This is where cyberpunk comes into the equation. Created in the 1980’s, cyberpunk stems from the realisation that our future lies not in outer space but in inner space; our bodies and our minds back on planet Earth. This subgenre of science-fiction looks at the ways technology could begin to control us rather than us controlling it. The grand guru of cyberpunk has to be William Gibson, who brought cyberpunk into the mainstream of science-fiction with his book ‘Neuromancer’. The main character, Case, has the ability (as do many humans in his era) to physically plug (or ‘jack’) into a computer and join a vast collection of artificial intelligences that contain most of the world in digital form. The book simultaneously demonstrates the power and the dangers of this intimate link with technology, making the point that
Written at a time when virtual reality appeared to be taking off as the ‘next big thing’, cyberpunk writers began to explore the fusion of the human brain with computers, basing their ideas on the continuing success of computer hackers, and creating in humans the ability to hack with their minds rather than hands.
Another of Gibson’s books, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ takes this idea a step further. In the future, information cannot be safely transmitted without it being hijacked en route, unless it is put inside the head of a mnemonic data courier such as Johnny. Dumping a large chunk of his long term memory, Johnny is now able to carry gigabytes of information in his head, and deliver them safely, assuming no-one takes his head.
This constitutes a major feature of cyberpunk: its landscape and political situation. There seem to be only two types of construction; derelict or skyscraper. The major multinational companies have taken over, and every other industry has vanished. This is why information is so valuable; each of the companies needs to be a step ahead of its rivals. This can be see more clearly in the film ‘Blade Runner’ which depicts a sprawling metropolis with massive buildings covered in advertisements towering over the seedy streets beneath. Apparently, William Gibson walked out of his local screening after half an hour of the film because it “looked so much like the inside of my head.” We can already see this sort of conglomerate emerging today with the dinosaurisation of large companies into even bigger ones. The following blurb about Gibson’s books explains why they seem so real:
The cyberpunk authors tend to deal in very downbeat futures where mankind’s outlook is grim and society is divided into the haves and have nots. However, they do tend to make mention of some form of apocalypse that has caused the state of decay, rather than it being a natural effect from what we are doing to the world today. No mention of an apocalyptic vision would be complete without mention of the following writer:
Although not strictly a cyberpunk author, Philip K. Dick has created much of the groundwork for the subgenre. His ‘Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?’ novel eventually became ‘Blade Runner’ and his other books used a lot of the darkness and pessimism that followed. His worlds are never the pleasant places seen in earlier science-fiction; every new or future world is a hostile environment that Mankind is attempting to conquer with varying degrees of success. The film ‘Total Recall’, based on his short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ was a perfect example of Dick’s warped perception. Mars has been colonised, but it still retains a toxic atmosphere while a huge company is hiding a machine which would remove the poisonous gases and make Mars habitable. If this isn’t enough, the film also includes a lead character whose personality has been rewritten from the murdering psychopath he used to be. Dick also opened up new thoughts about artificial life forms through ‘Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?’, which has been carried into more recent films. ‘Robocop’ portrays a city similar to that in ’Blade Runner’ with violent street gangs and massive corporations. In this instance, a police officer’s shattered body is rebuilt as a cyborg called Robocop, programmed to protect the people who live in the city from the rampant crime as the ultimate law enforcement officer. This is a further example of the cyberpunk-style merging of man with machine and brings a new level of concern, when the robot/android/cyborg becomes aware of who and what it is. As stated previously, part of the Rules of Robotics is that the robot should act to preserve its own existence, but not by killing a human. The Replicants in ‘Blade Runner’ are all rogue because they have passed their in-built expiry date and not died, hence sending Deckard, the Blade Runner, out to terminate them. These creatures only wish to survive, now that they have discovered what they are; a fact that was supposed to remain hidden from them. Do we have any right to terminate life, however it appears?
Another example of an all-powerful conglomerate, the company who built and own Robocop care nothing for the remains of the man inside the machine, even when Murphy starts to become aware of who he used to be before his shooting. If their ‘equipment’ is badly damaged, they are happy to terminate its life with no regard for the human factor. ‘The Terminator’ and its sequel show an even more worrying world where the robots have become self-aware and have taken over, using human beings as slaves. Artificial intelligence has created a sentient but unfeeling machine in the Terminator, and the humans have rebelled against their enslavement. However, at least they machines can be ‘killed’ without thought, as they are designed to kill, nothing more.
Much of these films about robotics and its more worrying advances can reasonably be extrapolated from what we know of robotics today, and the progress being made in this area, but we are also being warned about the consequences of a science as yet unproven: time travel.
We are still no closer to understanding whether this is possible or not, but the dangers are all too obvious. The Ray Bradbury story ‘A Sound Of Thunder’ shows this theory well; a group of explorers want to go on the biggest game hunt of their lives, back to prehistoric times to kill a tyrannosaurus. The time travel company have laid out a path that hovers above the ground so that the party do not trample and kill any plants that may later evolve into species we know today. The tyrannosaurus has been picked because it is about to be killed by a falling tree, so some bullet holes in it won’t make much difference. However, one of the party falls off the path and squashes a butterfly. He is then sent to retrieve the bullets which can’t be left behind for fear of changing the future, before the group returns to their present. They discover an uneducated populace living under a tyrannical dictator, purely because the ripples through time from the butterfly’s death have changed history over the intervening millennia. This is a perfect example of the science of Chaos Theory, which states that an infinite number of things can alter due to one minuscule event.
This idea is the whole basis of ‘Quantum Leap’ where Doctor Sam Beckett is sent on an unending trip through time, “putting right what once went wrong”, to make the future better. The series premise is explained thus:
The books based on the series examine the concept in greater depth through Al, Sam’s holographic partner. Whenever Al returns to his own time, because he has been outside his own timeline, he can see the minor (and sometimes major) changes that Sam’s actions in the past have caused in the future. The ‘Back To The Future’ films show the problems of time travel when Marty McFly is sent back to 1955, and meets his mother who instantly falls for him because “he’s so dreamy”. This disrupts Marty’s chance of ever being born, and he begins to vanish. The series causes numerous temporal paradoxes however; in the third film of the trilogy, Marty sees a picture of a gravestone telling him his friend Doc Brown has been killed in 1885. Therefore, he goes back in time to save him, which he eventually accomplishes. Of course, this means that there would be no picture for Marty to find, he wouldn’t go back, ‘Doc’ would die, then he’d see the picture, go back, and so on. Paradoxes seem to be the result of any visit into the past, or indeed the future.
The ‘Babylon 5’ episodes ‘Babylon Squared’ and ‘War Without End’ show a predestination paradox; the crew must steal the Babylon 4 space station and take it back 1000 years into the past so that their future can unfold the way they know it. They have been predestined to do this, because the station did appear 1000 years; they just have to make sure it still does, or alterations to the future could see the destruction of Babylon 5. The episode also shows the consequences of the major war that has been continuing during the series, with Captain Sheridan being thrown 20 years into the future and seeing that the Centauri, who chose the losing side in the war have had to pay by having their homeworld overrun by the remaining Shadow fleet.
‘Babylon 5’ takes unusual twists; the station was built to try to forge peace between alien races, and this is going well until the second series when a new war begins between the Narn and Centauri, closely followed by the Shadow War. It starts off with an optimistic future, then throws everyone into a galactic war in which many races will be decimated. As warnings go, it is a powerful statement about how fragile peace is, and how one event can tip a precarious political situation into countless wars. But how accurate are these visions of dark and forbidding futures?
This shows that there are two aspects to warnings in science-fiction. Firstly, there are the stories that show almost definite futures, and give ideas on how to make the world a better place afterwards. Then there are tales designed to make us think before a stupid and rash decision causes terrible repercussions. Both ideas appear prominently in the genre. However, there is also the less depressing side of science-fiction, where the reader or viewer can escape into a world of pure adventure.
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