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(2016
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2016 (Index) Essay 1: Compare, contrast, and evaluate Narratives of the Future |
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Tom
Britt
23
March 2016
A Gift to the Dead and a Warning to the Living
Typically, when authors pen “literature of the future,” what they are
actually writing about are the events of the present and the anxieties that
political, economic, and environmental circumstances instill in humanity. As
past student Zach Mayfield states in his essay “The Beat Goes On” in reference
to the Book of Revelation, “it was during a time when Christians were being
suppressed by the Roman empire” that the ideas written in that biblical text
came to life. In order to ease
their chagrin, an apocalyptic fantasy was crafted in which this physical world,
full of pain and unfairness for the Christian faithful, would melt away and be
replaced by a New Jerusalem. This cyclical theme of the destruction of the
current, less-than-ideal system and replacement with the better, sublime
existence is not exclusive to Revelation and can be seen in numerous places in
the Bible, including God’s destruction of the Earth in the time of Noah and the
decimation of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The works we have examined thus
far in this course seem to share similar ideas, albeit with their own
differences and messages, and I would like to explore the motif of cyclical
societal evolution as a running theme in futuristic literature.
On the other hand, in Octavia Butler’s
Parable of the Sower, we are shown
that it is possible for texts to not focus solely on an apocalyptic / creation
narrative, but also have the capability of weaving evolutionary themes in, as
well. Butler’s novel has many parallels to the creation story in the Bible’s
Genesis, with Lauren’s gated neighborhood bearing similarities to the Garden of
Eden and her access to her father’s library resembling the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge. The more Lauren learns of the state of the world and the people in
it, the more it becomes increasingly apparent that she will be, by choice or by
necessity, cast out of her safe haven and forced to toil along her road of
pilgrimage to her own personal Mecca. Her notion that “God is change”
additionally bolsters this theme of cyclical creation and destruction. The
obvious difference, in this case, is that Lauren is more of the savior or
prophet archetype, with the inception of her new religion, Earthseed, and is not
at all responsible for the ruin and ejection from her oasis of a community,
unlike Adam and Eve.
Likewise, in Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” the idea that bears in
the southern United States have learned to create, harness, and manipulate fire
presents an evolutionary narrative in the sense that animal existence has
changed and eliminated the taxing need for hibernation. While it does not
initially seem so, human beings in the story must also adapt to this
never-before-seen ability of their creature counterparts, dealing with bears
ostensibly camping on highway medians and blaming the animals for fires that
envelope residential homes. Fire has always symbolically represented the
embodiment of human progress, and the fact that an organism lower on the food
chain than humanity has attained the ability to handle it shows that this planet
that sometimes seems so stagnant is actually changing and evolving constantly in
subtle yet weighty ways.
Lastly, in order to fully enrich oneself in literature of the future, one
must turn his gaze toward the subgenre of alternative futures (possibly, that
gaze will be turned in multiple directions). The fascination with this subject
seems to stem from humankind’s desire to correct the mistakes of the past in
order to alter the future, like James Cameron’s
The Terminator, or simply to frolic
about in worlds long forgotten, which can be seen in the short story “Mozart in
Mirrorshades.” In this narrative, man has realized that it can step in
momentarily on alternate realities, allowing it to exploit resources from the
tangential timelines and bring them back to what the characters refer to as
Realtime, or the universe as we know it, ostensibly. The snafu to the whole
situation becomes, as the protagonist Rice soon discovers, when too many
liberties are taken with a past that never happened, local citizens rise up in
revolt and demand equal opportunity to travel amongst the timelines.
H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
takes a different approach to the alternative future niche. In this case, the
protagonist travels an unquantifiable amount of time into the future to a point
in which all signs of human life or structure has passed away and been replaced
by two sole species: The Eloi, childlike, carefree beings who desire no more
than to eat, play, and fornicate, and the vicious Morlocks who have become
subterranean animals that feast on the flesh of the living and terrorize whoever
they can when the sun sets. The scenario here is meant to be a metaphorical
commentary on class hierarchies and demonstrate a possible future if the rich
and powerful continue to drive the working class into the ground, literally and
figuratively.
All in all, it is clear to this avid student of literature of the future
that, while on the surface these texts might seem like pure escapism or simply a
good story for entertainment’s sake, there is always a deeper level of
understanding meant to be passed on when author’s craft stories of a scientific
quality. Most of the time, this understanding is meant to serve as a warning to
the reader in our present time, a warning of possible disasters the future
holds.
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