.:: THIS IS THE WORK OF AN ‘AMUSED, PYRRHONIC AESTHETE’ ::.
This is a running commentary regards the discussions of a New World Order that may currently be transparent as all things within a ‘twodee’ such as mine. Part one of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, for example, centres around the negotiations between UN Secretary-General Stormgren and the master of the hidden Overlords, Kalleren; part two, set fifty years later, begins with the Overlords’ long-delayed appearance before the people of Earth, an event the Stormgren would dearly like to have seen. If not perhaps for me (sic).
“Golden Age” pulp science fiction, in which most novels were fix-ups or collations of short-story sequences, often had a highly episodic narrative with frequent changes of scene and protagonist. These are the same desires of a ‘twodee’ as it discusses quick term discussions and variables and builds on transience if not history.
To the time-traveller, this is scarcely a gee-whiz world. A television documentary explains why 3001 is not nearly as shocking to a visitor from 2001 as our contemporary world would be to the people of 1001. people in 2001 ‘would have expected satellite cities, and colonies on the Moon and planets. They may be disappointed, because we are not yet immortal, and have sent probes only to the nearest stars (sorry NASA).
As a good extro-polation of a ‘twodee’s’ explaination and in a half-hearted gesture of technological innovation I throw to Arthur C. Clarke insight again. In his book he tells us that there is a new standard computer keyboard: ‘that QWERTYUITOP nonsense was discarded eight hundred years ago’. This is hard to believe, since when one of the characters tries out her ‘new thoughtwriter’ she types out a hoary old sentence that has no meaning except in the context of QWERTY keyboard training: ‘now it the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’. All future fiction makes some use of ‘familiar tropes’ to help readers identify with a new world, but in the year 3001 the familiar trope is out of control. Similar and moreover, the ultimate challenge facing humanity at the moment is still that of solving the mystery of the Monoliths discovered by their ancestors a thousand years earlier. And to solve it – so far as humans can solve the enigma at all – the people of today turn back time to the original mission control revived from the dead, that of us interpreting our first existance from alien observation and procurment and basically the fact that we humans are generated from possibly their own DNA if not creation.
We often cursed Einstein in the past; now we have blessed him. Even the powers behind the Monoliths, it now appeared certain, that could not spread their influence faster than the speed of light as in a ‘twodee’. So the human race should have almost another millennium to prepare for the next ‘off-world’ encounter – if there was to be one. Perhaps by that time, it would be better prepared if not received by the general public.
Clarke, as we have seen earlier, is well aware of science fictional expectations that by perhaps the fourth millennium humanity will have discovered immortality and sent probes throughout the galaxy. His message is more sober. Faced with the millennium festivities in a thousand years’ time, he reports that ‘everyone had become heartily sick of all the events planned to celebrate the end of the 2000s. There had been a general sigh of relief when 1 January 3001 had passed uneventfully, and the human race could resume its normal activities’.
The problem, not peculiar to Clarke, is one of a general loss of confidence in the fiction of the intermediate future as it does in a ‘twodee’. If, rationally (and barring a once-for-all change in civilised life sometime in the next century), we can only predict that what to us appear the ‘normal activities’ of the human race will still be going on a thousand years from now, then what is the point in setting fiction in such far-fetched – yet, it seems, banal and uneventful – times?
There is, then, a hint of artificial longevity, not to say ironic cryonic rigor mortis, about the contempory future-scene realism of writers such as Clarke, impressive though many of their achievements are. Within the limitations of the Einsteinian universe as spelled out by Clarke, the now traditional Space Age preoccupation with exploring the galaxy and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence seems to have reached an impasse. Some other basis for immediate-future fiction is needed. The antecedents of this subgenre, going back to the eighteenth century, show that – thought writers’ (as they existed as norrnal or expedential physics) conceptions of the next thousand years and more have always remained within fairly strict limits – these limits have changed quite substantially as science (fiction has evolved).
What intermediate-future fiction perhaps now needs is a return to Earth, since paradoxically the future-realistic novel set in outer space has come to seem so mundane. If the casual were to research into ‘alien’ phenomena nowadaze you’ll find allot more than what you bargained for. To explore human relationships in the genetically and cybernetic ally engineered contexts now foreseeable beyond the twenty-second century might lead once again to a kind of fiction in which the following dialogue would not be out of place:
“You must have seen a lot of changes.”
“Hard to know what to say in new time-world. Civilisation moved fast, fast, after your century.”
