Old and New Futures

September 25th, 2008

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What’s missing here? In tracing what he seems to see as a descent from golden age optimism to post-New Worlds “darkness”, Damien Walter gives the history of science-fiction a rampantly idealistic gloss - going so far as to write, here and now, 7 years into a global war on metaphysical impurity, something so bizarre as

How many more totalitarian states would persist today if Nineteen Eighty-Four had not warned generations against the threat they represented, both abroad and at home?

He attributes to science-fiction authors the capacity both to effectively warn and to inspire with new visions of the future, straining at times towards a kind of literary determinism.

But it’s an account of the relationship between science-fiction and another form of determinism that’s absent. The decay of a well-established tendency in depictions of the future was arguably the result of an attack on technological determinism as such, of the kind which underlay much of the golden age lit that Walter starts off with. The politicisation of science-fiction in the 60s and 70s had more to do with trying to articulate evolving political responses to the complexities of a technological society than being simply a loss of faith in the future.

Science-fiction has, in recent years, struggled to break free from outmoded ways of understanding the relationship between the now and the not-yet, of which technologically determinist interpretations of social change (which still of course rule the media) were an exemplar. Certainly, writers like Mieville, MacLeod and Banks have all approached science fiction as a way of thinking through the politics of technological change, and represent the futures made possible by technology as co-determined through political choice and action. Without an attack on technological determinism, which, as a form of representing the relation between the conditions of social change and change itself, arose alongside the increasingly autonomous development of industrialised technology, then the same old future will be born again and again, one in which, essentially, some things get bigger while others get smaller.

The philosopher Andrew Feenberg noted that technology is really a non-democratic form of legislation: without any oversight, it changes the form of everyday life in countless, far-reaching ways to which individuals have to adapt without comment. Science-fiction is evolving into, amongst other things, a challenge to the way society views its relationship to technological innovation, one which aims to make strange our assumptions about it in the way that Jameson suggests is the unique contemporary cultural contribution of speculative fiction. And so are many other forms of social life: insurance, for one.