LITR 4632 Literature of the Future

Sample Student final exams 2009

Paul Acevedo

12 July 2009

Virtual, Corporate, and Alternate Worlds

            Why do we read science fiction? Is it solely escapism, the desire to be somewhere else and someone else? Perhaps it is curiosity; people always want to know what will happen ahead of time. And yet there are so many visions of the future. Apocalyptic narratives foretell cataclysmic, imminent destruction, either because of humanity’s actions or god’s degree. Evolutionary narratives simply predict a future of changes: new governments, technology, and even worlds for our species to discover.             Looking ahead serves another purpose besides prediction, though. It sheds light on familiar ideas and issues through the lens of the unfamiliar. The best literature of the future says something about here and now, despite its fantastic situations. The stories that our class has read offer many insights about humanity.

            A frequent science fiction theme is the effect of cyberspace on humanity. The internet of the present day grows and evolves into a digital world that humans can move or even live in. In William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” the physical realm and the digital matrix are fairly distinct. People do business in the digital world so that they can live comfortably in the real world. This separation distances the actions in cyberspace from their physical repercussions. Bobby and Automatic Jack rob Chrome blind, ruining her life because they do not have to see her suffer; she hardly qualifies as a person to them. The focus between digital and physical worlds shifts in “The Onion and I” by Thomas Fox Averill. A couple and their son live almost completely in cyberspace with only brief departures to reality. But the father realizes that something is missing from their digital world: the natural perfection of the onion. As Bryan Lestarjette writes in his 2005 essay, “[The characters] find themselves longing for a trace of the real world, which can never be perfectly simulated.” I would argue that a world without onions is more perfect one, but I can see his point. Physical reality is romanticized to an even greater extent in Richard Goldstein’s “Cyberfiddle.” The author imagines a future in which people have lived digitally for so long that their humanity is all but lost. The detachment seen in “Burning Chrome” grows to the maximum possible extent. Not only has human compassion died, but also ecological responsibility. Trees are now extinct. In stepping away from nature for good, we kill it off; neither humanity nor nature can survive without the other. All three story’s authors foresee cyberspace as something that strips us of something integral.

            Not every integral part of our species is good, though. Greed is one of its most dangerous traits. The desire for profit has lead to marvelous advances in technology and medicine, but what happens when that desire goes unchecked? In the dystopian world of Paul Di Filippo’s “Stone Lives,” businesses have outgrown governments and replaced them. Non-corporate areas fall into a state of hopeless neglect while corporations focus only on competing and warring with each other. Here the ruling class is oblivious to the miserable fate of the poor. The story’s title works as a metaphor because the wealthy elite lead lives as hard as stone, free of essential human compassion. The corporation in “Mozart in Mirrorshades” is hardly more humane. They steal resources from an alternate past, secure in the knowledge that their own timeline will not be harmed. We see the theme that distance from their actions causes people to behave cruelly and without compassion again and again. The cybercriminals of “Burning Chrome” are separated from their prey by a digital divide, the corporate honchos of “Stone Lives” by their glass towers, and the exploiters in “Mirrorshades” by time itself. Speculative fiction warns that we must not leave our humanity behind as we move into the future.

            Perhaps a minority exists that would be happy to abandon its humanity. Such is the protagonist in “The Belonging Kind” by Sterling and Gibson. Corretti is not cruel or greedy. He does not escape into cyberspace; he just hangs around in bars, among people to whom he feels no connection. He only realizes the extent of his detachment after a chance encounter with a chameleonic alien. He has more in common with her than his own kind. So he sheds his job and home like she would shed a disguise. Corretti eventually becomes one of the chameleons and finds belonging at last. His transformation is a fanciful solution to a very real problem. The desire to fit in is human, but some people never find their place in the world.