LITR 4368 Literature of the Future         Model Assignments

Final Exam Essays 2015 assignment  Sample answers for Essay 2: personal / professional interests

Kimberly Hall

May 4^th, 2016

Back to the Future

“...would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.” – Victor Hugo

Literature of the future, predictably, looks at current social and political issues, with an eye to the slippery slope of how those issues may present in the future. Speculative fiction is not frequently noted for its literary merit or social value. However, in examining works of speculative fiction, one can identify the authors’ fears for the future and desire for social and political progress. By looking at historical events and social systems surrounding works of speculative fiction, I plan to discuss the social and political themes specific to each piece, as well as how these works have functioned as vessels for discussions of social and political progress, both historically and today.

The Time Machine, written by H.G. Wells and published in 1895, deals heavily with the ideas of social Darwinism and class conflict. Seen through the eyes of ‘the Time Traveler’, humanity has evolved into two different species, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Time Traveler eventually comes to the conclusion that capitalism has translated into natural selection, with the working and upper socioeconomic classes evolving separately into different species. The conflicts between the Morlocks and the Eloi directly mirror the conflicts between the working and upper classes at the time Wells was writing The Time Machine. Workers’ unrest and labor strikes were extremely common in the 19th century[1], and the upper class were fearful of violent labor disputes—just as the soft, non-working Eloi are terrified of the times the Morlocks will lash out against their oppressors. Wells likely intended this novel to spark discussion of these significant social issues—and though it was written in the late 1800s, The Time Machine still sparks discussions of the same kinds of labor issues over a century later.

Similarly, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) opens up discussion for and criticism of mass production and industrialization. Both Brave New World and its German film contemporary Metropolis (1927) take heavy inspiration from the economic depressions and social upheaval that came out of the First World War—particularly the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Weimar Republic. They also take some direct inspiration from Henry Ford’s assembly-line principles[2]—both stories are set in cultures where critical thinking and individualism are discouraged in favor of homogeneity and mass production, and where social castes are extremely stratified. Capitalism is criticized in both works, describing systems that care more about a bottom line than the people working the machines. And those issues dealt with in both Brave New World and Metropolis are still relevant today, as people debate economic and social consequences of raising the minimum wage, as well as companies funneling jobs overseas in order to pay less for labor and deal with fewer labor regulations. The conversations that took place around these stories when they first appeared are still taking place nearly 100 years later.

Homogeneity and loss of individualism are also heavily criticized in Audrey Ferber’s “Drapes and Folds”, a more recent short story where all decorative fabrics have been banned and rebellious individuals are being brainwashed into compliance with the party line. In fact, the mantra of this society is “utility or futility”, which falls directly in line with the capitalistic idea of profit over personhood. Fabrics here are used as a metaphor for individualism, with the Powers taking that individualism away when it becomes potentially dangerous to the status quo. Just like the characters in Brave New World and Metropolis, Pearl in “Drapes and Folds” expresses the fears of losing personal freedom and being used as a slave for profit–fears which have not abated since any of these stories were published.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower deals with more social issues than I have time to comprehensively describe. Even the name of the novel clearly states that Butler intended to send a message—a parable is inherently a story with a message. In Parable of the Sower, the main character Lauren Olamina lives in a post-apocalyptic United States, where the natural environment has somehow been destroyed, the political system has subsequently decayed, and the cost of living has become dangerously high. Butler uses Parable of the Sower to touch on corporate greed, misogyny and racism, homelessness, illiteracy, and drug addiction, all of which are set against the backdrop of a society collapsing under the strain of environmental failure. These issues were all extremely important in the social discussions of 1993, when Parable of the Sower was published, and continue to be relevant today in discussions involving intersectional feminism and climate change.

Octavia Butler herself gave a speech at MIT in 1998 called “Devil Girl From Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction[3], in which she spoke about social issues that she addressed in her novels and short stories. She specifically pointed out the kinds of real-world modern-day slavery that exist in Parable of the Sower: what she called “throw-away workers” (i.e.- workers that companies use for profit until they can no longer work, at which point the company throws them out), company towns–which feed the profitability of “throw-away workers”–and for-profit prisons. She also addressed how climate change factored into the apocalyptic setting of Parable of the Sower, and how it “went in and out of fashion”[4] while she was writing the novel. The reason that issues like climate change and real-world slavery are generally unpopular is because fixing these issues requires going against certain societal norms and forcing those in power to take collective responsibility.

These same themes are, I think, even more common today, with the resurgence of civil rights movements and opposition to systems placing value on profit over people. Modern dystopian novels, like The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, have settings in which those in lower socioeconomic classes are systematically oppressed and characters are forced by the government into desperate, life-threatening situations that the upper classes use to keep the lower classes ‘in their place’–a common real-world effect of capitalistic systems that place value on individuals according to how much money they have. In both of these novels, the government regularly selects groups of children to fight to the death, for the dual purpose of quelling dissent and profiting off of televising the events. Other issues of systemic oppression arise from this kind of system, also addressed in these novels, such as glamorized mass-consumption (like in Brave New World), simultaneous suppression of individualism (like in Metropolis and “Drapes and Folds”), classism and misogyny, and police brutality–all of which have been in the news nearly every day in recent years. Novels like these are extremely critical of the systems that perpetuate these problems, and the authors and characters alike push for comprehensive social and systemic change.

What all of this shows is that people in the past had the same fears for the future that people do now. The most common thread among them is, unsurprisingly, fearing the loss of freedom. This is especially relevant when we look at one of the colors of this common thread–a criticism of capitalism. H.G. Wells feared that the separation of labor between social classes would make the upper classes too complacent with the status quo to care about their workers; both Brave New World and Metropolis critiqued systems that put profit over peoples’ safety and autonomy; Octavia Butler directly compared company towns to slavery in Parable of the Sower. These systems maximize profits while ignoring the welfare of those doing the real work, and those in power routinely refuse to take responsibility for the problems they create. And in “Chocco”, we see the disastrous effects of such a system in Jon and Mikal’s dialogue on ‘the Machine People’. The Machine People valued maximized profit and materialism, rather than living in harmony with natural diversity and effective equality. Jon and Mikal’s community, on the other hand, thrives because it embraces the things that the Machine People rejected.

In “Chocco”, Jon and Mikal do exactly what I hoped in this essay to do–look into stories of the past in order to find flaws in the systems that existed and fears of the people living in them. I hope that I have also shown how the issues and fears for the future presented in past stories are still relevant today–especially now with a multimillionaire running for president of the United States while openly espousing racist, classist, overtly capitalistic views so heavily criticized by this literature. Literature of the future–speculative fiction, the literature of ideas–takes the problems that authors see in society today and presents solutions to those problems, so that the readers can then build a better tomorrow. Progress, after all, is not just about moving–it is about moving forward.