LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Sample Student Final Essay 2003

Travis Kelly
LITR 4632 2003 final

LITR 4632 Final

            Literature of the future inherently implies a strong focus on futuristic themes and scenarios. Evolutionary, apocalyptic, and alternative themes all revolve around scenarios which strike the reader as foreign and strange.  During the second half of this course, however, there has been a strong focus on stories which juxtapose these new sensibilities with the old.  In other words, the future is portrayed either in the context of, or in competition with, the world which existed prior to it.  However, this is not done to favor the past over the future, or vice-versa.  Rather, it is done to offer the possibility of merging the two together and creating a new kind of future which would otherwise never be conceived. 

            “Chocco” is an excellent example of a story which meshes a futuristic reality with older sensibilities.  The narrator and his people are descendants from “The Machine People”, and they use solar collectors to gather energy.  Thus, they are at least aware of technology and its uses, and are able to recover artifacts from The Machine People and conjecture as to their uses.  At the same time, Chocco is clearly a society rooted in its past, and they cherish time-honored rituals and modes of living.  The existence of narrator, the Memory Keeper, is proof enough of the value Chocco places on remembrance of the past, and the answers given by Jon and Mikal emphasize the importance of remembering the mistakes made in the past.  “The Onion and I” makes a similar link between past and future through the narrator’s father.  On the one hand, the family is extremely forward-looking, being the first family to live entirely in a virtual world.  On the other hand, they recognize the importance of the real world, and use it as a reference point for coming to terms with Bidwell.  The father’s onions serve to differentiate the real (old) world from the new one, such that they can co-exist in the narrator’s mind and augment each other’s meaning.

            Often in these stories, the future is used to represent hope and possibility while the past represents emotion and moral soundness.  In “Drapes and Folds”, the future is extremely bleak, and the past serves to humanize the characters in an otherwise inhumane world.  Xera, Pearl’s granddaughter, is more machine than human, and her friend Diana has had her mind wiped.  However, Pearl’s attachment to her old cloths temporarily awakens sympathy in both of them, an emotion they might otherwise never experience.  Likewise, “Speech Sounds” presents the reader with a bleak vision of the future, with the only hope coming in the form of the two children able to speak Rye finds at the end of the story.  However, people cling to the past as a means of mentally surviving the world they now live in.  The bus driver continues to drive his bus despite the inherent dangers of doing so, and Obsidian continues to act as a police officer despite the fact that the police no longer exist.  As Rye speculates, “Perhaps putting on an obsolete uniform and patrolling the empty streets had been what he did instead of putting a gun into his mouth.” 

            Often, the foreign nature of futuristic scenarios is contrasted with the familiarity of past in order to lend the visceral impact of the latter to the former.  For example, “Homelanding” presents a world in which the Earth is being visited by alien life forms.  As far removed as that reality is from our own, it is the old concept of death which is utilized by the writer to bring a sense of familiarity to the reader.  In addition, in an attempt to explain the characteristics of humans to these aliens, the writer reverts to describing the timeless concepts of sex and mortality to appeal to the alien reader.  In “House of Bones”, the narrator represents the future while the foreign world he is in is the past.  Regardless, it is the common themes of past and future which lend significance to the story.  The narrator notes, “There are only so many ways that a male human body and a female human body can be joined together, and all of them, it seems, had already been invented by the time the glaciers came.”  Likewise, the narrator gives the tribesman contemporary names and continually equates their life to contemporary life.  Thus, although the effect is being applied in the opposite direction, the effect is the same.

            In “Newton’s Sleep”, Ike is willing to forget the past and embrace the new life in space.  He is even willing to go as far as to terminate all communication with Earth and remove all artificial recreations of earth from the station.  However, as the “delusions” people begin to have illustrated, it is impossible to extricate oneself from the past cleanly.  Ike is the only one who perceives this truth as a tragedy, and by the end of the story it appears that even he has come to terms with the past to some extent.  Similarly, the past encroaches on the future in “The Logical Legend of Heliopause and Cyberfiddle”, in which Pryer is mesmerized by the prospect of constructing a violin.  The past, in the form of the violin, assumes a sort of irresistible allure which Pryer, although he was born and raised in the Warren, cannot ignore.  The Bummer confirms this inextricable connection of past and future when he tells Pryer, “I knew you would come some time” (to collect the past).  Indeed, at the end of the story it is implied that the mystery of Heliopause has been unraveled by the appreciation of the violin, or, the past.

            The past plays an integral role in the literature of the future.  So long as people are able to remember the past, they will use it to confront the unknown territory of the future.  As the future eternally becomes the past, the connection grows ever stronger.  Susie’s presentation of The Stand illustrated this point quite well, showing that the past will be integrated with the future no matter the circumstances.  People will remember what came before, and it is this memory which will always define the future.

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