LITR 4632:
Literature of the Future        

Sample Student Final Exams 2011 Essay 1 

  

Katherine Fellows

Low-Tech vs. High-Tech: Familiarity vs. Progress

          Before enrolling in LITR 4632, I had limited literary experience with any of the aforementioned visions of the future. My exposure to science fiction literature came primarily from television--Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, The X-Files, The Outer Limits, Doctor Who, Sanctuary, and many more science fiction shows, which accumulated over the years. Many of these shows were directly influenced by classic science fiction literature; Stargate SG-1's episode "Beneath the Surface," for example, draws from H. G. Wells's Time Machine to depict a society based on the social principles that led to the evolution of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Sanctuary--inspired by Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Edgar Rice Burroughs's At the Earth's Core, and many others--constructs an entire Hollow Earth subplot, a combination of steampunk and utopian subgenres. In primary school, one of my first hardcover purchases was a copy of Nostradamus's complete Prophecies, which, after seeing countless prophecies on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I pored over with a highly skeptical eye. My experience with science fiction literature, then, came from the classics--those works of science fiction literature from the early twentieth century or earlier that have influenced popular culture at large. High-tech and cyberpunk themes were virtually nonexistent in my readings--computers had not been created at the time such works were written--but ever-present in the television shows I watched. Low-tech alternate realities were often present, but they were generally depicted negatively, as though society, when faced with two paths, chose the wrong one and never fully evolved.

          This semester, then, I learned much about how these scenarios are presented, particularly in contemporary science fiction literature. In our readings from Burning Chrome and Virtually Now, high-tech, cyberpunk style was the rule, not the exception. William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" depicts a world where information is quite literally as valuable as human life. The title character, Johnny, lives and works as a data trafficker--a person implanted with "microsurgical contraautism prostheses" and a special chip, which allows him to store data within his mind without ever really knowing it (9). Hackers and computer information specialists exist today, of course, but their occupations are not literally a part of their beings. The "Yakuza assassin," sent to kill Johnny, has been physically altered as well:

 [T]hey must have amputated his left thumb, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they'd carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament. (6-7)

The assassin uses this bodily addition to kill Ralfi. This high-tech future is attractive because it makes accomplishing tasks much easier, but the repulsion is that it apparently blurs the lines of morality. At what point does humanity end and machine begin?

          Thomas Fox Averill's "The Onion and I" explores this issue further. As realistic as the Bidwell System's recreations seem, there is always a natural element missing--a sense of spontaneity that seemingly cannot be recreated by algorithms. The father and son attempt to create a Cyberonion--a kind of platonic onion that represents onion-ness in all its purity--but, unable to effectively distinguish the various vegetables with coding, fail to accurately portray the texture. Ultimately, the family realizes that their Bidwellian counterparts can never replace them. Cyberspace is "a place no more real, though increasingly no less real" than reality (21). By Averill's reasoning, while high-tech, virtual reality can approach our reality as a curve approaches its asymptote, virtual reality can never truly intersect or replace our own--it can never provide the same sensations and attractions that living with nature provides, although whether such a perspective is positive or negative is not discussed.

          However, as a representation of low-tech visions of the future, Ernest Callenbach's "Chocco" presents an argument for selective adoption of technology--perhaps a more thought-out argument than "The Onion and I" provides. Callenbach separates the Machine People from the River People by emphasizing the incorrect choices they made, which led to their downfall:

[T]he Machine People were no less intelligent than we are. After all, they had the same brains we have, the same physiology exactly. […] The terrible collapse that followed might tempt us to suspect them of limited mental capacity, but it must have been cultural disorders and misadaptations that brought their world to its end" (193).

According to Callenbach, then, technology itself is not to blame; the functions technology serves within our societies are responsible. Rather than use technology to better understand nature, the Machine People use it to replace nature: "They were ignorant of biology--all our excavations and analyses have revealed no knowledge of the sacred plants and their powers, and we can detect no signs that they understood the cyclic interconnections that constitute Gaia" (193-194). This led to their extinction, not the mere advancement of engineering.

          In "House of Bones," Robert Silverberg draws directly from the familiarity of the River People to depict the low-tech state from which own our cultures originated. The narrator, traveling thousands of years into the past, is accepted and welcomed into society. When faced with a character even less evolved than those he first meets, however, he assumes that, as we might, the low-tech people who care for him would not be accepting of the new, less evolved stranger. The narrator serves as a symbol of our current society--one that views value and progress in terms of technology rather than in terms of the base humanity we all possess. This low-tech mindset appeals to readers insofar as it connects all people through a single commonality, but seems equally unappealing in that it seems to hinder technological progress; competitively, humans would rather relate to those people deemed the most advanced, rather than the least.

          Thus, assuming that the initial purpose of science is to understand humanity's context within the universe, the appeal of low-tech science fiction visions of the future is that they offer a more personal appeal to readers. Readers can naturally relate to them, simply because they portray the basic instincts and settings that human civilization was born from. Low-tech science fiction is appealing because our own society sprung from a low-tech state, and we have survived, if not thrived. High-tech science fiction, by contrast, is unfamiliar, unproven, and uncertain, and therefore feels unsafe; according to Laura Moran in her 2007 Final Exam, “Virtually or Actually: Keeping it Real,” “[e]ven though humans are in favor of making life easier, they are resistant to change.” In "Chocco” and “House of Bones,” Callenbach and Silverberg capitalize on these feelings to present what might be argued as an ideal return to our natural tendencies, shunning what high-tech society values as progress. However, in “Johnny Mnemonic” and “The Onion and I,” Gibson and Averill illustrate a high-tech future that, while potentially unsafe, appears progressive and feels like advancement in technology and human thought. Compared to my own encounters with visions of the future through classic science fiction novels, these contemporary short stories provide an uncertainty that leaves much to readers’ interpretations.