LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Sample Student Midterms 2007

William Bazemore

June 18, 2007

Learning Lessons and Heeding Warnings without the Inconvenience of Experience

Here I am stuck in this dungeon of a study room trying to answer the age old question of what inspires people to write and to read literature.  A question not easily answered but one that deserves an investment of time to explain.  To an author, the purpose of writing literature, especially narratives, may be to express that person’s knowledge, wisdom, or feelings in the form of entertainment but I may need to be somewhat critical in the reader’s purpose.  Many people generally lack the ability to recognize the relationships between series of events and their impacts on the future.

Narratives then become an effective medium in which causality can be more easily recognized and understood.  Narratives of the future appeal to many people because it can also be interpreted as a form of prophecy.  In any society, people usually feel a certain amount of uneasiness when they think of the future.  They believe at least on a subconscious level that their generation will be the one that must faces some future disaster and are always constantly searching for the answers that will help them survive such a cataclysmic event.  Considering empirical knowledge can only be gained though experience and mankind hasn’t lived though an apocalypse, his knowledge can only be gained through revelation.

We enjoy these stories because we feel prophesy narratives are our survival guides for living through such experiences; be it escaping from rioting urban cities like in the Parable, avoiding the deadly plagues in Revelations, or surviving a zombie infestation like what was mentioned in class.  It’s deliverance, be it the individual’s soul, or the societies, that spurs people to try and finds these answers.

Most future narratives can be lumped into three separate categories: apocalyptic, evolutionary, and alternative.  Since prophecy is usually a concern for the immediate future, we will start with apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic narratives are those which spell out the end of days; the destruction of all that which we hold dear in this world and are perhaps the oldest form of prophetic narratives.  On a linear timeline, they are usually marked with spontaneous creation and an abrupt destruction of our reality.  The most readily recognized is the stories of genesis and Revelations found in the Bible.  The Genesis tells of the creation of the world and mankind occurred in seven days yet by giving man free will, the seeds were sown for its eventual downfall.  Because Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge we lost our ability to live in paradise and have sense lived in toil until such time we may be judge for our past transgressions.

That’s why Revelations is so popular. It tells of our timely destruction yet also our ultimate salvation.  Also the time frame isn’t specified which leading people to believe it will be their generation that will face that hand of doom hovering over us.  But all is not lost.   I couldn’t say that Revelation is a pure form of apocalypse because life after death is possible, leading us to believe that we can.

I would hazard to guess there aren’t many forms of truly apocalyptic narratives in existence because the idea that redemption is self delusion is unacceptable to the human conscious.  This is why we find usually hybrids in narratives like the Parable of the Sower.  In this story, a young girl is faced with the reality that civilization is crashing around her in waves of cruelty and despair.  In her story, salvation becomes self fulfilling when she, as well as her band of followers, takes it upon themselves to create their own destiny.  The idea behind this story is that even though the world in a sense is ending, life beyond is something that can be obtained, making this story of evolution.  This idea of life after apocalypse is a popular idea played in movies like Independence Day, Delirium, V for Vendetta, etc.

But I believe I am getting a little too far ahead of myself.  In order for us to understand the blending or these two genres of narratives, we must first understand what evolutionary narratives are. Evolution narratives are those that involve events that don’t lead to the complete destruction or end to a linear time frame but rather an adaptation to the changes.  Time sequences become circular in nature with a kind of tabula rasa or rebirth mentality.  Change is not as abrupt or violent as is found in apocalypse narratives but rather a slow process spanning generations and millennia.

Probably the most readily recognizable evolutionary story is the Time Machine by H.G. Wells, in which the lone traveler retells his adventures in the future and the things he witnesses.  In his narrative, he tells of a future mankind that has slipped into two separate species and how they forsake the knowledge and wisdom of there ancestors for pleasure and self indulgence.  It would be accurate to call it devolution of humanity when we no longer feel the biological urge to survive we are fated to fall.  At the end of the story the time traveler finds himself in the distant future and all he sees is an endless wasteland where monsters roam.  I believe he was trying to illustrate a world that closely resembles the primordial earth with which life came from; a return to its original state.

These cycles don’t always have to be so large but rather a cycle of generations found in Stone Lives.  In this story the future world is at the height of technological innovation yet this is a world where squalor also exists and the primal urges driving society are the same at the animalistic instincts that drove our chimp ancestors millions of years ago.  There still exists that need to fight for our survival, but our arena has changed and the tools have become more sophisticated.  The protagonist, Stone, who has lived in dregs of society before being risen to peerage, gains the necessary insight of both worlds to recognize the similarities.  He was forced to see the ugliness of both sides of civilization in the hopes that he may one day break humanity away from its endless cycle. The evolutionary side of this story comes from the idea of the mother, being Stone’s anonymous benefactor, passing the torch to her son and with it the hopes and responsibilities of tomorrow.

Not all evolutionary narratives need to be so heavy handed, which is what we find in Bears Discover Fire.  I believe this is a satire on the primitive urges that allowed us to enjoy fire. Our protagonist and his nephew seem to be living in the past while the world, and especially the bears, is evolving.  I believe this story wanted to show the convergence of the instincts between the main character and the bears when they sat around the fire, enjoying the hypnotic dance or the flames.  I believe evolution is very popular because people gain the ability to manipulate and the future.  It also leaves open the idea that some changes in the world are outside the realm of human influence but without the ability to go to the future we need to be very couscous in interpreting the consequences of humanities actions.  This idea of consequence or “what if” becomes the driving force behind our next type of narratives: alternative future narratives.

Alternative future narratives come from the idea that there exists an endless realm of possibilities where the choices we make can cause a divergence of time in which two separate and viable futures emerge.  The problem with this is the face that we lack the abilities to change the past or witness the future and as such alternate futures cannot exist unless we were to delve into the realm of metaphysics.  There are certain ideas even in reality that can propose the possibility of alternate dimensions, one being the Strings Theory.

The first example of alternative future narratives came from the short story The Garden of Forking Paths which tells of a Chinese man on the run from authorities for giving secrets over to the Germans in World War II.  He comes to a house in which he meets a Dr. Stephen Albert who shows the protagonist manuscripts dating back to his ancestor Ts’ui Pen.  In these manuscripts the main character finds himself in the endless labyrinth or possibilities were each forked path can lead to a different destiny.  I believe that trick of this narrative is that the narrative is actually the labyrinth Ts’ui pen proposed and if you would have continued it you might have found Dr. Albert still alive and the protagonist still free; the endless possibilities being left unsaid.  That would make this story more surreal because one can’t picture where the real narrative ends and the labyrinth in it begins.

Another story which delves more into the metaphysics of time travel is the narrative Mozart in Mirrorshades.  In this narrative the protagonist is a care free worker for some company that exploits the past for their oil.  In it Mozart synthesizes techno music and the main character’s girlfriend is Marie Antoinette.  It basically shows an approach to the manipulation of time with no regard or morality or consequence.  If history didn’t go as you planned that you would just change it to fit your needs.  Because each change causes a divergence or futures, the logic is if it’s someone else’s dimension or reality you are exploiting so why bother worrying over the effects.  This illustrates history in a “boy with an ant farm” approach.  The beauty of alternative future narratives is that fact that it can leave so much to the imagination.

That is found more in the story ‘bout Half Pat Eight’ in which the main character must some to terms with the choice of his good friend and co-worker’s decision to have a sex change operation.  The story is about Byron’s struggle to come to terms with the divergence of the current reality from the one which his friend was still a guy.  When alternate future is combined with apocalyptic or evolutionary, it is usually the idea that all futures are changeable and destiny isn’t fixed.  Why most people enjoy this type of narratives is the fact that it is liberating to know that preordained isn’t fix and we are no longer chained by fate.

Through each of these three narratives types we can learn valuable lessons and heed important warnings without the inconvenience of experiencing these things. That is why this class is important.  It is because we are the individuals who will shape the future and without a deep understand that our actions today have great weight in the distant future.  One of the drawbacks of the science fiction of future vision genres is the fact that having strict time periods in prophecy narratives make them lose their legitimacy after that time period passes.  An example is where are all of the millennium apocalypse novels in the twenty-first century?  That means that novels aren’t judged by the messages that tell but rather the accuracy of the hard facts in it.  My personal view on science fiction is that it can teach me how to avoid the cataclysms in our future or at most survive them.  It also allows us to learn from past mistakes even if such mistakes are fiction.  Once society learns to appreciate hypotheticals, we can see a world in which more concern can be given to our future.