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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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Kimberly Hall
March
23rd, 2016
The Power of Three
People, as a whole, tend to like patterns. In fact, human brains are built to
recognize patterns. This is the reason that leitmotifs exist, and why
syncopation throws everyone for a loop. Patterns allow us to predict certain
outcomes in any given situation, and then follow the rhythm of life as it takes
us to unfamiliar places. If patterns are present, then the universe makes sense
and all will be well with the world. This holds even when the world is a
fictional one. And one of the most enduring patterns in any world is the number
three. All the best things in life come in groups of three—from geometric
stability, to fictional heroes, to narratives of the future. Just like our
favorite fictional trios, the three different narratives—creation/apocalypse,
evolution, and alternative future—may occasionally clash, but under the right
circumstances can work harmoniously. Some speculative fiction stories will be
aligned with one narrative or another, while others prove that the narratives
can intersect without too much dissonance. Like Karin Cooper did in her essay,
“The Alternative Evolution of the Apocalypse”, I will look at all three types of
speculative narratives, discuss how certain stories’ narratives differ and why
some of them overlap, and point out where patterns of three fit into all of
this.
The
creation/apocalypse narrative is one that seems to never grow old. The timeline
is linear, direct, and easy to grasp, with three main components—creation, to
exile, to apocalypse, where rebirth is a possibility but not a guarantee. This
timeline directly reflects what we know of natural life- there is birth, growth,
and death, with no guarantee of rebirth. The biblical book of
Genesis is a clear example of the
creation and exile segments of this narrative style; in
Genesis, humans are one with God in
the Garden of Eden until they fall in sin and are exiled, living out their lives
in extreme hardship. The book of
Revelation is the ending to that beginning; in
Revelation, the end of the world has
been prophesied, and the storyline sets up Jesus Christ (whose personal story is
rife with patterns of three) as the hero of the true believers who will vanquish
all evil in the world and lead them to a better life, described in rich, sublime
detail. Octavia Butler’s
Parable of the Sower is another tale
that follows the creation/apocalypse narrative. Our protagonist, Lauren Olamina,
starts her story in a relatively-utopian neighborhood in the middle of a dying
world. Her loss comes in three parts- first, her brother leaves the neighborhood
and is killed; second, her father disappears on his way back to the neighborhood
from work; and third, the rest of her family is murdered in a terrible fire and
she is forced out of that neighborhood. Lauren’s story ends with her fighting
her way to establishing her own relatively-utopian community.
Where Parable branches out
from the creation/apocalypse narrative is in Lauren’s personal story, which
follows the evolution narrative much more closely. Evolution, at its core, is
about change- but those changes almost always fit into a pattern of some sort.
Lauren is described as a survivor, and her personal philosophy, which she calls
‘Earthseed’, is the primary guide to the community that she begins to build.
Earthseed has three main tenets- one is that it is their destiny to leave the
planet Earth, and the other two dictate that the world’s greatest constant is
change and that humans must adapt to the ever-changing world in order to
survive.
This
philosophy is very in line with the Darwinian theory of ‘survival of the
fittest’, which is one of the primary narrative forces in evolution stories.
Another story with this ‘survival of the fittest’ model is Paul Di Filippo’s
“Stone Lives”. Stone, the main character, individually evolves in three stages.
First, he is blind and physically disadvantaged in his world, and is forced to
develop some extremely useful skills in order to survive in ‘the Bungle’ where
he lives, like a keen sense of smell and excellent auditory and spatial memory.
The second stage happens later, when he is given cybernetic implants which allow
him to see as well as enhance his memory even further; with this adaptation
Stone is able to thrive and dominate in the ever-changing world of corporate
competition that he is thrust into. Stone’s third and final stage of evolution
happens at the very end of the story—his cybernetic implants are rendered
inoperable and he is made blind once again, but at the same time Stone is put in
a position of extreme social power and corporate control. As natural evolution
would have it, Stone gains the things he needs to adapt to his environment and
eventually loses the things he no longer requires.
The third narrative in this set of three is the wild card—alternative
future. By their very definition, alternative future narratives are less
predictable than their apocalyptic and evolutionary counterparts. They deal
heavily in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, and frequently experiment
with time travel and the idea of multiple universes, which are all intensely
scientific in nature. However, as readers, we need some kind of familiarity to
mentally keep hold of the story, and so the patterns of three still recur. For
instance, in Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s short story “Mozart in
Mirrorshades”, the three agents of ‘Realtime’ – Sutherland, Rice, and Parker –
have all been placed back in time to Salzburg after the French Revolution and
have since created a new timeline. Each of them also have distinct views on what
it means to travel through time like this. Sutherland sympathizes with the
people rebelling against Realtime for the destruction of their resources; Rice
is more neutral, and rationalizes altering history and appropriating natural
resources with all of the helpful technology that has made its way into the new
timeline; Parker is simply in the business to make money. This pattern of three
viewpoints mirrors real life—there are those who would give everyone their
freedom (Sutherland), those who would take it away in the name of profit
(Parker), and those who stand in the neutral ground trying to rationalize
everything (Rice). The authors also place a well-known historical figure aligned
with each of these viewpoints, providing even more stability in this world of
whirlwind-time-travel.
“The Gernsback Continuum”, by William Gibson, also works in the
alternative future style, as well as with patterns of three to give the reader
some stability when processing the alternative futures presented in the
narrative. The narrator, in the very first paragraph, mentions three different
examples of his visions of the future— a ‘flying wing’, a futuristic roadster,
and huge 80-lane freeways—giving the reader the ability to somewhat anticipate
the kind of visions he is going to describe later. Throughout the story, the
narrator has three separate visions of the future- a large boomerang-like
aircraft which should not be able to fly but does, a
Metropolis-esque city standing behind
him, and two perfectly white and blonde and blue-eyed people in a futuristic car
in front of him. These three visions are described in vivid detail, and are
presented as futuristic archetypes of the Jungian collective unconscious.
Continuing sets of three give the reader stability in a world where it is the
narrator has to differentiate between reality and future-vision.
Finally, H.G. Wells’ The Time
Machine is the mother lode of future narratives and symbolic patterns,
working in all three different narrative styles. By the nature of it being a
time-travel story, it is working in the alternative future narrative style- it
presents a future that may or may not exist, and we the readers simply have to
trust that the Time Traveler knows what he is talking about in terms of physics
and time travel methodology. Wells’ narrative itself works in three parts- the
past, the present, and the future. The
Time Machine even demonstrates how all three can work at the same time, with
the narrator in the present telling the story of the Time Traveler in the past
telling him about his period spent in the future. The Time Traveler himself
tells three stories of the future in his flashback narrative- one of the
Morlocks and Eloi, one of an even deeper future full of large crab-like
creatures, and one of a great solar eclipse nearly 30 million years into the
planet’s life. The direct timeline and movement towards the end of the world
work in the creation/apocalypse style, and the evolution of species as well as
significant ‘survival of the fittest’ notions that present themselves in the
Morlocks vs Eloi story indicate use of the evolutionary style narrative. And
then, for our final number three- the epilogue of
The Time Machine takes place three
years after the Time Traveler told his story and disappeared.
There is an old adage that states, “once is happenstance, twice is a
coincidence, three times is a pattern.” Sets of three in creation/apocalypse
narratives mirror sets of three in life, they continuously present in stages of
evolutionary narratives, and they provide recognizable comfort and stability in
otherwise-unpredictable alternative futures. While these continuing patterns of
three may not have specific significance in a given narrative, the fact that
they exist so consistently throughout different aspects of narratives of the
future is simply an all-too-human method of finding predictability in the world
around us.
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