|
LITR 4368 Literature of the Future 
|
Sample answers
for Essay 2:
|
 |
Greg
Bellomy
10/15/2016
Class, Identity, Progress, and the Future
Authors of literature depicting the future are forced to draw upon their
conceptions of the present and to imagine where it is going. Often, these
concepts are developed through the process of magnifying perceived crises in the
author’s time. When one considers the difficulties associated with making a
living as a writer, the prevalence of concern about future economies makes
sense. Parable of the Sower and The Time Machine both function as
types of warning tales about future economies, though Butler and Wells differ in
their concerns and visions. Likewise, “Chocco” and “Hinterlands” provide
cautionary tales of how economic concerns can somehow outweigh the survival of
our planet and untold human lives.
Parable was written by Octavia Butler during the early 1990s,
which was a time of great social upheaval in much of the United States. Some of
the changes that were occurring at the time included the move toward greater
corporatization, growing wealth imbalance, exploding rates of drug usage, and
urban riots. This is highlighted through the lack of social cohesion,
unreliability of government, and general hardship for normal people. The general
state of hardship included shortages of jobs, food, potable water, and safety.
In hopes of protecting their properties and families, pockets of neighborhoods
walled themselves in from each other. Despite these apocalyptic developments,
the government manages to continue as an ineffective shell which is powerless to
help its own people. This is a contrast to the fact that the government still
manages to put humans on Mars, the merits of which are debated within the book.
Another factor which cannot be ignored in Butler’s future vision is the impact
of drought and climate change on the society. Food is so scarce that the
protagonist, Lauren, learns to make a flour out of acorns. Lauren’s supply of
acorns is ended when bandits break into her walled community and flush out its
survivors. This is another repeated theme in Parable; in the process of
taking from one another, the people end up destroying their vital means of
production. While some people might find this to be a cynical assumption about
the future, when considered through Butler’s identity and setting, it might seem
more realistic.
Likewise, the concept that different classes of people will evolve into
biologically different species probably seems farfetched to most people. Here,
too, it is important to recognize how the author’s identity affected those
visions. Being an English student and academic in the late Nineteenth and early
Twentieth Centuries, H.G. Wells was highly exposed to the prevalent concept of
Darwinism. This explains his fixation on the continued evolution of the human
species, as well as one of the reasons for this novel’s vast success; the idea
had hardly been explored to date. Still, this alone does not necessarily explain
his vision of how the classes become separate biological species; this also
required a sense of separation between the rich and the poor. This concern was
borne from other authors of the era, such as Karl Marx and William Morris. Like
Darwinism, these concerns about the directions and equitability of society
pervaded the era. For Wells, these concerns became somewhat merged in his
membership and participation of the Society of Fabian Socialists. Wells’
membership in this elite group of academics and socialites probably informed his
vision of class separation being inevitable. In a similar fashion, the idea that
one group of humans would take the responsibility for caring for and managing
the rest probably comes from this association.
Though both Butler and Wells are shown to be highly effected by the
settings in which they lived, Butler’s future vision is much more oriented
towards social survival, with changes being necessary within the individual.
While one would assume that survival in times of hardship would require
savagery, the author defies expectations by introducing Lauren’s hyperempathy.
In a book review titled “The Intuition of the Future,” Jerry Phillips aptly
describes the problem, saying “The social disintegration brought on by a market
system, based squarely on the competitive drive for profits, with all else going
to the wall, leads to the erosion of moral community.” Phillips’ description of
hyperempathy and its role as “… a symbolic negation of the psychopathology of
atomized, corporate society.” In Butler’s future vision, the problems are
matters of ethics, whereas in Wells’ vision the problem is more about
stratification.
A few things stand out about Wells’s future vision regarding class.
First, considering the man’s humble upbringing, the protagonist and the author
both seem to identify with the Eloi, or the future vision of the upper-class.
More importantly, the future earth is not dominated by the upper class, but by
the evolved workers, in the Morlocks. At first glance, this plot element seems
to affirm the Marxist perspective, that workers will rise and overcome the idle
elites; but, it is important to remember how far into the future that the Time
Traveler went. The existence of abandoned buildings, decaying statues, and lost
knowledge indicate that a utopian society has already come and gone. As Matthew
Taunton notes in his article “Class in the Time Machine,” “This profoundly
pessimistic vision of the future, then, expresses not only Wells’s horror at the
realities of 19th-century class relations, but also his fears about what utopian
socialism and communism were offering in their place.” Beyond this, it can be
said that The Time Machine represents a sort of post-utopian narrative; Wells
concludes that the achievement of utopia can only be followed by social and
intellectual decay, as wits and self-preservation are traits that are refined in
relation to their necessary towards survival.
In “Hinterlands,” William Gibson considers the economic impact of a
future where humans are contacted by aliens. The effect that he envisions this
having seems very akin to the experiences of indigenous peoples who have had the
misfortune to interact with technologically superior and spiritually inferior
Westerners. In Gibson’s vision, 70 percent of the returnees from alien contact
commit suicide. Somehow despite this fact, the Highway, which is the portal
through which travelers go to the alien world, remains busy with returnees, who
are generally expected to last less than three days before they kill themselves.
Ultimately, this job is so hopeless and depressing that nearly everybody
involved in the short story is using heavy drugs and eventually attempts
suicide. Despite this nasty truth, the uglier truth is that the pursuit of alien
technologies (probably for the sake of money) outweighs the waste of human life
to the multinational corporations involved in the trade. Although it uses a
different future narrative format, Gibson’s vision has a startling similarity to
Callenbach’s account of the Machine people in “Chocco.”
In Gibson’s story, the Machine People lived in a society that is
identical to our own. Their lack of concern for the environment and their
societal structures (or their preoccupation with making ends meet) prevented
them from making the changes that would have been necessary to keep their
civilization thriving. Hierarchical relationships and the constant state of
competition for money and resources eventually led to war, once the planet could
not sustain the ten billion human inhabitants on Earth. Although it is not clear
within the text, an imaginative reader might assume that the resource demands
and collateral damage of war further depleted the means of production that would
ordinarily be used for the support of human life.
Considering that Wells lived during the age of Industrialization and
expansion of Western influence, it makes sense that he could not imagine the
economic or ecological situations which we face today. During his lifetime,
there always seemed to be new markets and resources to exploit. The ever-growing
world seemed capable of eternally supporting greater demand for resources and
assets. Today, though, we are nearing the end of the viability of our own
financial and economic systems. The debt-based currency system necessitates that
there is always more debt than currency in circulation. While some economists
will argue that cheap labor and competition are positive things for our economy,
the present reality is that things are only improving for a small minority of
people. Likewise, the continued development of previously idle lands has not
decreased the cost of housing for most people in the Western world. Quite the
opposite has happened, rather. Every quarter, the bottom 96% of American workers
are spending a greater amount of their income on basic living necessities. The
increase in the cost of living has not been justified with the improvement or
enhancement of goods or services. This pressure on the bottom 96% to give labor
in order to produce fiat currency for payment keeps people from having the time
or the inclination to contribute to a positive change.
Unfortunately, the current landscape of tightening economic conditions is
forcing individuals and institutions to search for new places for yield. Wolf
Richter reports that “ Revolving credit outstanding of $1 trillion, spread over
117.72 million households, would amount to $8,300 per household. But many
households do not carry interest-bearing credit card debt; they pay their cards
off in full every month. Finance charges are concentrated on households that use
this form of debt to finance their spending and that cannot pay off their
balances every month. Many of these households are already strung out and are
among the least able to afford higher interest payments.” One of the places
where people are trying to make a buck (or some more valuable equivalent of it)
is in Bitcoin. While the cryptocurrency revolution might seem like a positive
thing for some people, it has the potential to increase our global demand for
and usage of energy. According to Anthony Cuthbertson of Newsweek, “Analysis of
how much energy it currently requires to mine bitcoin suggest that it is greater
than the current energy consumption of 159 individual countries, including
Ireland, Nigeria and Uruguay. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index by
cryptocurrency platform Digiconomist puts the usage on a par with Denmark,
consuming 33 terawatts of electricity annually.” Considering that the mining for
Bitcoin will continue until the production is maxed out, this phenomenon has the
potential to waste an even larger amount of energy in the coming years.
Regardless
Works
Cited:
Phillips, Jerry. “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia
Butler's ‘Parable of the Sower.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 35, no.
2/3, 2002, pp. 299–311. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/1346188.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/class-in-the-time-machine
www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-track-consume-worlds-energy-2020-744036
https://wolfstreet.com/2017/12/11/how-fed-rate-hikes-impact-us-debt-slaves/
