LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Sample Student Final Exams 2011 essay 2

Valerie Mead

Future Idiocy: The (Mostly) Illiterate World of the Future

            As a lover of literature, a voracious reader, and a future literature professor, I believe that literacy is one of the most important and crucial aspects that a society can have.  Literacy is something that is extremely hard for a society to gain, but relatively easy for it to lose.  As it is so important for a society to be literate, its loss is devastating on multiple levels and can cause the said society to fall into a spiral of regression and decline, setting them back several hundreds of years.  Illiteracy is a frighteningly prevalent and disturbing theme in future literature, and it is a common one in many of the works we have read this semester.  As a result of my love of books and my chosen career path, the idea of widespread illiteracy that is presented so casually in future literature was one of the topics that stuck out to me the most throughout the semester.  This may be a result of the aforementioned personal traits, but also because I can see that this can easily happen, and not just something that might happen in the distant future; illiteracy is a reality that many countries face and is becoming more and more prevalent in developed countries, like the United States.  In short, the idea of widespread illiteracy presented in future literature is so frightening to me because it is something that obviously is already set in motion right now—there is no fictional element to the idea of widespread illiteracy because it is already happening, and can only get worse.

            A great deal of future literature narratives are apocalyptic in some sense, and, as a result of that, the picture most of these stories paint for the future is undoubtedly bleak.  So it should come as no surprise that these authors present their fictional societies in the future as being illiterate.  What bothers me so much is the very real, very pressing issue that is behind their stories, and I feel that these authors, much like those who write about ecotopias, are trying to give their audience a cold, hard dose of reality about what the future could hold, in addition to a good story.  This can easily happen, and in many future literature stories, it does.  Illiteracy happens to these societies fairly rapidly, usually for a number of reasons.  In Parable of the Sower, though it does not give a specific amount of time that has passed, it seems that it has been less than one generation, and yet there is already a great population within the society that is illiterate.  This is unfortunate because literacy would have helped these people to build a better world for themselves, as Lauren attempted to do for herself and those around her.  She used her ability to read to gain as much knowledge as she could before she went off on her journey to north.  Because she was able to read, she knew about many edible plants and also about how to find drinkable water, which was scarce, in places the majority of the population did not know about.  These skills, obtained because Lauren was literate, could have easily saved her life, as well as those of her fellow Earthseed followers, and they would have helped a great deal of the rest of the population, if only they had not lost the ability to garner information from printed materials. 

In future literature, the majority of the societies presented lose the ability to read and write mostly because they are focused on the primary goal of staying alive.  The Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest kicks in, and passing on the skill of literacy, because its values are not immediately evident, is seen as less and less relevant.  This also relates to the idea that people, as a whole, are focused on the idea of instant gratification, and because literacy does not immediately help a person, it can be seen as pointless to learn.  This is seen with Parable of the Sower and many other science fiction stories.  However, there are some narratives of future literature where the society feels that it has come up with a more efficient means of communication, which they feel makes the use of reading and writing obsolete.  In “Stone Lives,” the high tech society in which Stone lives has created a new means of communication which they feel renders reading and writing irrelevant.  However, even this high tech society chooses to preserve the methods so that reading and writing can be known to others, if they chose to learn, as Stone wishes to.  Even though they think that the idea behind it is irrelevant because they have found more effective means of communication, they still preserve the means of reading and writing, which should show the reader exactly how relevant literacy really is. 

Many future literature narrations revolve around some sort of catastrophe taking place, such as the stories “Drapes and Folds” and “Speech Sounds.”  When Octavia E. Butler, who wrote “Speech Sounds,” imagines the most devastating effect of a pandemic, she feels that it would be the loss of reading, writing, and speech for the majority of the population.  In “Speech Sounds,” not only are the people not able to communicate with one another through the use of speech, and thus convey emotions, needs, or desires, but they cannot even write to each other as a substitute for their loss of speech.  Even if some could write, virtually no one would be able to read what was written.  Furthermore, the very few that can speak in “Speech Sounds,” like Rye, cannot read what one who was struck mute would be able to write to her.  This epidemic caused confusion and dissention on a massive scale, all because the people became illiterate and, thus, were unable to communicate with each other.  Literacy goes much deeper than showing the level of one’s education, but it helps to unite a society and the human race as a whole through its use as an effective communicator.  With the loss of literacy, many means of communication are lost as well.     

            Though the future is overwhelmingly presented as losing the valuable asset of literacy, there are a few exceptions to this, as is seen in many stories, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Gernsback Continuum.”  These narratives have an underlying focus on the idea that literacy is relevant and important, which is how it is presented in these stories.  There is a strong emphasis placed on literacy in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” with one of the main elements of the story being the book/labyrinth that was written by the Dr. Tsun’s ancestor.  The solving of the mystery surrounding the book/labyrinth was crucial to the story and the character of Dr. Albert, which could only be solved because he was literate.  Also, Dr. Tsun took advantage of the fact that the German soldiers would read of Dr. Albert’s death in the newspapers, and thus know which city to attack.  None of this would have been possible without widespread literacy and ingenious thinking.  “The Gernsback Continuum” also has a focus on the use of reading and writing.  Literacy is important because it helps the Parker to inform the wider world about the past that never happened.  In “The Logical Legend of Heliopause and Cyberfiddle,” it is absolutely crucial that the narrator know how to read and write.  He needs to know how to write in order to communicate with the other members of the Warren, and the only way that he can build the violin that he is so obsessed with is by being able to read the instructions from the old book.  Though being able to read was not lifesaving to the narrator, it was crucial to him to make the violin, which could only be done because he was literate.  Also, in “House of Bones,” though the narrator travels into the distant path, he uses his literacy to record the life of the people he lives with, because he knows that it is essential that the people he left in the present have as much information about them as possible.  He even makes it one of his goals to teach the people of his new society in which he lives how to read and write because it has not been invented yet. 

            Literacy is a very important aspect of any society, and on a personal level, it is very important to me as well.  As a lover of literature and a person hoping to make a career out of it, I feel strongly that literature is necessary to individuals and societies as a whole.  As a result of most science fiction narratives being apocalyptical, the future that is presented in these stories is obviously grim.  Because of this, these future vision scenarios often present the future as a desolate world where, more often than not, the societies presented have lost the assets of being literate.  This could be for a number of reasons, but the most common is that literacy does not help a person immediately with their goal to survive, and as Darwinism’s survival of the fittest becomes more and more pressing, the people in these stories tend to lose literacy because of it.  Though the majority of these science fiction narratives focus on a loss of literacy in the future, there are some stories in which the characters or the society at large make a point of trying to remain literate for the greater good of those involved.