LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Student Midterms 2013 assignment Sample Student Submission

Sera Perkins

Essay 1

Tell me a Story

            Narratives of the future follow certain rules, such as H.G. Wells’s first rule: Don’t change too much or your reader will not be able to relate to the story. I believe H.G. Wells’s rule isn’t only applicable to the story or the characters, but to the structure of the story. There are three narrative structures that literature of the future is built around: Creation/Apocalypse, Evolution, and Alternative Universe. Sometimes these narratives intersect; a story that has an evolution theme may also be set in an alternative universe. The Bible (English Standard Version), Parable of the Sower, “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Mozart in Mirrorshades” will be used to define these three narratives of the future. To show how two of the narratives could be used in the same story The Time Machine and “Bears Discover Fire” will be used as examples.

            The first of the objectives, Creation/Apocalypse stories begin with something beautiful and pure, such as Adam and Eve in the garden. After a great calamity, the first sin, there is chaos and sorrow. In Revelation, beauty is restored and everything is at once back to the way it was before that first calamity. There is a beginning, middle, and an end; a linear, easy to follow timeline. Time starts in the garden, where Adam and Eve work the land and rule over the animals until they eat of the forbidden fruit. They are cast out of the garden, and punished further for disobeying God for the woman’s child birthing would be extremely painful and the man is to work for his food for the rest of his life (Genesis 3:16-19). In Revelation God creates a Heaven on earth for those who are faithful to him. “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36). Although there is an end we do not have a definite time for it, so the middle is pretty drawn out and the end is either far into the future or maybe tomorrow.

            Unlike a straight, linear timeline, evolution timelines are like a slinky, a circular spiral twisting on and on but repeating itself as it does so. The end of evolution is in innumerable years, spanning for thousands. Evolutionary narratives involve a great amount of change and adaptation on the character’s or environment’s part. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren must adapt to her chaotic world in order to survive. A popular theme in this type of narrative is a powerful and overwhelming strive for survival. Lauren’s Earthseed discusses this evolutionary change as “Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident of by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying” (Parable, 29). Lauren creates a religion where Change is her god. Change happens whether we expect it or wish it or not. Her adaptation of change and intelligence is a theme of evolution. Even though her world has fallen to rubble around her, slowly she begins to change into someone who can live and survive outside the walls of her community. She is not the same girl from the beginning of the book, and whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant if she survives.

            Alternative Universes, are usually the most difficult for readers to relate to. In Jorge Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” alternate universes are explained as a labyrinth. Whereas in most stories when someone is given multiple options, he picks one and eliminates the others, but in Ts’ui Pèn’s story he picks all the options at once. “He creates, in the way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork” (Forking Paths). In this way of thinking, there may be an unlimited number of alternative universes based off of choices one did not make in his/her original universe. Another way of looking at this third narrative structure is to think of a limb branching off the trunk of a tree. When a character makes a choice, he creates an alternative universe branching off the first universe and creating a timeline based off the choice he didn’t make. In “Mozart in Mirrorshades” First President Thomas Jefferson accuses the company from the future of destroying their past , but a man of the future counters that it isn’t his past they are destroying because by influencing this past another future is created (Mozart, 227). Rice and the company do not care about Jefferson’s timeline because it isn’t actually their timeline. The portal they have open to transfer materials is what keeps their timeline available to them. If the portal were to close then they would be stuck in this timeline and if they did manage to get to the future, it would be the future of the branch they created and they would then be held responsible for their actions of influencing in the past.

            Not every narrative of the future is only one of these three objectives; some overlap. A prime example of this would the H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the year 8,000 or so, The Time Traveler comes to a future of a “perfect” garden. There are only fruits and flowers, only butterflies to pollenate them, not a single predator in sight. “In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs” (Time Machine, 39). This is evolutionary in that only the best of the plants and animals are what’s left in the future. The Eloi are ancestors of human beings, living in childlike peace. The Time Traveler calls this a “climax” and is greatly pleased with the outcome of man and Nature. When the Murlocks are introduced, The Time Traveler realizes that humanity evolved beneath the surface. They appear crude and destructive compared to the Eloi and The Time Traveler fears them as much as the Eloi do. While being that the garden is “perfect” The Time Machine could be a Creation/Apocalypse narrative as well. The protagonist finds himself in a Heaven on earth. There is no war, no hatred, no pain, no sickness among the Eloi. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 12:4). It is explained as evolution on humanities part to become the Eloi or the Murlocks but there are some elements that are not simply evolutionary. The Time Traveler witnesses further into the future an apocalyptic world, the sea and the sky are deep red and giant crabs rule the world. The chaos and hopelessness of the very far future are like the tribunals of God in Revelation before the coming of God again.

            “Bears Discover Fire” is another example of a story using more than one narrative to explain literature of the future. It is an evolution narrative in that the bears no longer need to hibernate. “A climatic ecologist said that the warm winters (there was no snow last winter in Nashville, and only one flurry in Louisville) had changed the bear’s hibernation cycle, and now they were able to remember things from year to year” (Bears, 21). They adapted to the change in weather making hibernation unnecessary, and they could burn a fire all winter. Beyond the evolution narrative, “Bears Discover Fire” could also be an alternative universe. The people in the story seem to accept this new behavior of bears as if it were conceivable that bears could discover fire. While they are generally curious that Bears can now use fire and no longer hibernate, the populace doesn’t react with too much resentment or shock. When the narrator and his brother get back in the car after replacing a flat tire the brother says in very conversational tones “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” as if it were no big deal! Later the narrator goes to sit with the bears after his mother’s funeral. He says it makes the bears nervous so he leaves. The way the author writes the story in a way that the characters do not fear the bears could be interpreted as an alternative universe because the reader laughs at the very idea of bears using fire and more laughable is people’s response. A bear standing over you, holding a torch as you change a flat tire would not be something you could simply get back in the car and shake your head at. There would probably be more screaming involved.

            Is a narrative of the future about decline or progress? The objectives of narratives are the answer. Creation/Apocalypse stories begin in paradise, followed by apocalyptic devastation, but in Revelation there is more beyond the rapture and the tribulations, there is paradise again. Evolution narratives are about rising from the chaos around a character and witnessing the way that character adapts to survive. In alternative universes, a great many things can happen: decline, progress, rapture, chaos, paradise. The many is accepted because this is not the original universe, or the universe of the reader. When the rules change (bears can now use fire) the reader accepts it. Sometimes the narratives connect, bears evolved into beings capable of creating and managing fire while at same time they evolved in another universe altogether. These are the three narrative structures literature of the future follows. They are a part of Wells’s rule of keeping things relatable to the reader. Using structures we understand, the Bible, evolution, and a branching tree metaphor, bears could be discovering fire or a man could travel to the year 800,000 and witness the wonders of the perfect society is worth acceptance.

Essay 2

What do you know?

                    Metaphors are used to explain something you do not know with something you are familiar with, using no apparatus like similes. Directly, an idea or a visual is painted by comparing one thing to another and where no relation of the two could be conceivable. Literature of the future uses metaphors to describe the unknown with the known to offer the reader something he/she can understand to something he/she may know nothing about.

                    In her 2011 essay Taking Some of the Science out of Science Fiction, Tanya Partida writes: “While high-tech science fiction writing has a way of capturing our attention with images of flying cars and robotic armies, readers are still looking for good story behind all the description.” I agree with Partida’s opinion that readers are looking for a good story and that sometimes high-tech science diminishes it with complicated linguistic the average reader may not understand. What I have against Partida’s next claim: “High-tech narratives are always in danger of bogging down readers with over the top descriptions about future technology that is difficult to keep up with in our less advance age,” is that high-tech is the not keeping readers from relating to a story, but the means of using metaphors to connect readers to the material.

                    Low-tech science fiction stories can confuse their readers if their story is too outlandish or they have no means of relating the material. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a fine example of low-tech science fiction; she uses metaphors to describe scenes in which most people would have no way of fathoming themselves. As Lauren and her small band of walkers travel, she compares the horde of people with her to “a broad river of people walking west on the freeway” (Parable, 176). A freeway is not usually packed with thousands of people walking, so to offer the reader a way to imagine the freeway flooded with people she compares them to a river and Lauren and her friends are caught in its current. Later when the three come across a commercial water station, the author offers a brief history of people frequently getting robbed at these places. As Lauren leaves the station she sees “a pair of two-legged coyotes grab a bottle of water from a woman…” (Parable, 202). By calling the robbers “coyotes” the reader images scavengers, greedy and primal and vicious just like the predator they are equaled to.

                    Metaphors behaving as a means of imagery are also used in the Bible. Revelations is full of metaphors; God’s will is difficult to understand and a book on the rapture of the world could be pretty incomprehensible.  John writes Revelations in a way that Christians could cognize what God wants them to know. Chapter 16 depicts the seven bowls of God’s wrath and the seven angels that carry out his will. “Then I heard a loud voice from the temple telling the seven angels, ‘Go out and pour the seven bowls of the wrath of God’” (Revelations 16:1, ESV). I don’t think these angels are not actually carrying bowls that hold God’s wrath. It is later that it is said the bowls hold wine, grapes crushed under the wrath of God. This imagery metaphorically offers a picture of angels pouring out God’s wrath as if it were wine in a bowl, the plagues flowing onto earth fluidly.

                    While we don’t make a habit of traveling like a river on the highway, the idea of thousands of people traveling at one time is not a hard image to grasp. A story of the year 8,000 or so would be a bit more difficult to identify with. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine uses metaphors because the very idea of time travel and the future the protagonist travels to are outrageous for the time period Wells wrote. To connect to his readers Wells explained his universe in terms he knew his readers would understand. When The Time Traveler finds where his time machine has been taken, he gestures to the little people towards the bronze gate under the Sphinx. To his gesturing the Eloi make a face the protagonist does not know how to describe at first, but he says “suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman – it is how she would look” (Time Machine, 48). In his time period anyone reading his book would understand immediately how the Eloi reacted and could conjure a mental image of their faces even though they have never seen an Eloi before. It isn’t quite like comparing a multitude of people to a river, but in his way Wells is giving something his readers know to apply to something they do not know. As he relays his experience, The Time Traveler explains the very act in a metaphor. He equates his experiences to that of a native from Central Africa visiting London for the first time then going home and relating everything back to his friends and family. The traveler would learn of the world of London that is so different from his home but when he goes back how could he compare his knowledge to that of the people who do not know of “railway companies, of social movements, of telephones and telegraph wires…and the like” (Time Machine, 52). Although he is doing his best, The Time Traveler knows that his audience can only understand so much and gives a brief moment of understanding to the men who do not understand.

                    Futuristic narratives require metaphors to connect the reader to something of their time to something astounding about the future. In alternative universes, metaphors manipulate past the strange new universe and bring it back to something relevant to the reader. “Somebody up there likes me” is a short story that hints at high-tech, but it’s more like an alternative universe where people have come to care for computers as if they were living beings. As Dante and Boyce go to Mickey’s place to pick up a Revelation 2000, they step into his workshop and the first thing they see is “mutilated corpses of computers from the past ten years lay in heaps around the cylindrical room, most horribly crushed or burned or melted” (Somebody, 228). When described as the remains of a battlefield after the battle is over, there is some sympathy that could be drawn up for the inanimate objects. The author gives the scene of a tech-geek’s bedroom, taking computers apart just to see how they work and putting them into the guts of another model. Words like “corpses” gives the human quality the author depicts the whole universe operating under, that computers are more like living beings.

                     Tanya Partida’s quote of comparing high-tech to low-tech in relation to relatable content to readers, has very little to do with the way readers understand science fiction narratives. The elements of whether there is high-tech or low-tech do not matter so long as the author writes in a way that the reader comprehend the material offered by using metaphors. Comparing one thing that a reader may not comprehend to something that has nothing to do with it but is knowable to the reader is an excellent way for readers to relate to science fiction, both high-tech and low-tech and even alternative universes.