Glenn Hough

LITR 4632 Final

Start: 9:15

Break: 10:30-10:45

Stop: 12:00

By which yardstick shall these six different scenario archetypes be judged and ranked?  I think I shall pick a thread which was not mentioned in class but which has more relevance to me.  I shall ask the following: of these scenarios, which is the most important to our future?  Which scenario, and it’s associate main theme, in my opinion, does need to happen to ensure our long term survival as a species?

            How do they rank?  What’s most important and what’s least?  I’d rank them like this: most important is

            Ecotopia

            High Tech

            Low Tech

            Off Planet

            Alien Contact and

            Virtual Reality as being least important.

Now we get to the big question as to why I’d rank them like this.  Why ecotopia as number one?  Ecotopia, as we’ve seen, is a spin off of the utopian literature.  It mainly deals with a concern for the earth, of living in harmony with things/people/resources.  In the process this literature condemns most of western thought as destructive.  To ecotopian thought, their distopia is the current US over-consuming, overproducing, hyper-accelerated living.  This is but a reflection of what I mentioned in the midterm as Literature of the Future as being a literature of current concerns.  To the ecotopia school, their concern is the US lifestyle.  As we saw in Chocco, the background theme was of ecotopia, of living not as we do, but as, say, the American Indians did, in harmony with nature.

            I see this as the major issue we will be facing in this century.  What we gain from this idea of ecotopia is an idea of balance, or harmony.  Western culture, typically, has a more command/control mentality, and balance with ones surroundings is not a factor to consider.  In Shikasta, we get the idea that what we’re doing now is just a phase of devolvement and that things can change.  Combine that with more main street ecotopian thought and we get the position which states that there is hope for the future but we need to make changes, we need to move out of the phase we’re in now.

            Second on the list is high tech.  We’ve got it, it’s not going away, unless we utterly collapse, so we need it and we need to deal with it.  From the cyberpunk movement we get a strong notion of dealing with the world as is.  This is the world and this is what we need to deal with.  This position would reject apocalyptic literature as either naive or just plain stupid, a copout.  If you’re waiting for God to come back, or for the world to end, then you don’t need to be doing anything in the world today.  This is what Gibson, in Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic, is all about.  The world as is, we deal with it, we let technology serve our needs.  This type of high tech literature also speaks of greater acceptance of people as they are.  This was one of the main messages in Ghost in the Shell.  Kusanagi is a full replacement cyborg and is not treated any differently than anybody else.  And by the end of the movie her definition of herself has evolved and expanded again.   High tech, as a lit of concerns, blasts the current hypocrisy of the drug policies in this country.  It blasts trying to enforce morality with prostitution being illegal.  We’ve already seen the high tech world revolutionize how we do business and it’s in the process of doing that to how we communicate.  We need more of this for the long term.  Our political system itself needs a high-tech revamping.  But as Drapes and Folds points out, this has to be for the people and not against them.  If government controls high tech, then we descend into all sorts of technological terrors.  I’m reminded of the Stazie(sp?), the East German secret police.  What they did in surveillance, to their own people, with what we would consider to be low-tech procedures and data storage, was mind-boggling.  It serves as a warning for what high tech can do if unleashed with no constraint.  Or, as in Anthem, we see a society so control by government, there is no tech to speak of.  In the Gibson works, government is faraway and mostly irrelevant, people take care of themselves.  This is something I think which we definitely need more of.

            So, just as high tech makes us look at the world, deal with it, and do it on our own, low tech reminds us we need to deal with each other, we need each other.  Newton’s sleep is a bridge here.  They’re dealing with the world, by getting off-planet, which is high tech, but it’s the low tech aspects, the human interconnectiveness, which will decide if they thrive or not.  All the visions, which can’t be explained by science, is the real key to how they will live.  Science can only go so far and that it’s the other stuff, which science can’t deal with, which is most important.  This low tech fiction reminds us that tech is just tech, it’s just stuff, and it’s people and how we relate to them which matter most.  In Bears Discover Fire, the central message was how we relate to each other in a low tech, simple way, over fire.  How that’s been lost and is still necessary.  In House of Bones our time traveler was tested on how compassionate he was to the Neanderthal.  After he passed by showing kindness, then he was accepted fully.  Speech Sounds was about the great collapse and then the possibility of rebuilding, step by step with human interconnectiveness, with speech, as the central pillar. 

            Now I come to the latter three, the three which aren’t that important.  The first three are things we need to solve, deal with, and keep with us in the short term, say one to two hundred years.  The back three are important, in the longer run, over two hundred years, but are not important before then or are basically unimportant to human survival itself.

            Off planet, as we see in Hinterlands or as in Newton’s Sleep, only becomes important if there is a reason for going.  It was aliens in one and environmental collapse in the other and that’s my general impression as well of NASA today.  We could be on Mars today, but there really wasn’t the drive, and the reason to go yet.  If we develop cold fusion here on Earth, then we’ll have to go back to the moon for the Helium three.  This just proves that we’re not going to do it unless there is a good reason for it.  This is why space is not important for the short term.  In the long term, space gets bumped up in importance, but not in the short term.

            Alien contact is of even less importance, but the further out into the future you go, then the more important it becomes.  I think this category will surpass everything in ranking of important eventually, but that’s on a very long term time horizon.  We see this in Poplar, Made of Meat, Belonging Kind, and even Hinterlands and Homelandings to a certain extent.  If it happens, as in Hinterlands or Homelandings, it become important, very important.  But with made of Made of Meat, if we’ve already been looked at and they don’t want to deal with us, it doesn’t matter to us right now.  We have other things to worry about.  If people are being snatched for studies, that doesn’t really matter for the long term survival of the species as a whole.  People disappear everyday and it never means anything to the overall scheme of things.  And if aliens are walking around, existing side by side with us, it’s big news if you can prove it, but it doesn’t really matter if no one knows about it.  Even the Coneheads made the effort to fit in, pay their taxes, be on the PTA and simply live among us peacefully.  It didn’t matter in the slightest that they weren’t from France.

            And last and definitely least is Virtual Reality.  VR should play the least amount on our future.  VR is the ultimate copout, the ultimate retreat from reality.  In practical terms, the more VR which is present in the world, then the more we’ve devastated the planet ecologically, as in Heliopause, or our social structures don’t meet the needs of it’s members, as in Onion.  The mother in Onion had ambitions which the real world couldn’t accommodate so she dragged her family into the VR world.  The more we’ve screwed up, then the more VR comes into play.  In comparison then, the holodeck in Star Trek: Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager is the proper way to handle VR.  You go to the deck to have fun, have a holiday, do what you want, and then you leave.  People like Barclay, who was addicted to the holodeck, are treated as addicted, as in it was something to get over.  VR is not the world and can never be the world; it can never provide everything we need.  The Matrix is a perfect example of this.  Neo and those like him couldn’t except the VR world, so they sought out something, which was the way out of that world.  Even that world couldn’t provide for everyone.

            In conclusion, I think our long term survival keys off of  regaining a sense of balance, of being able to deal with the world and the stuff we create, of dealing with each other, moving off planet, meeting other sentient beings, and then avoiding the temptation to retreat from the universe.  Once we master all of that, the rest should be easy.