Skip to main content

Future Guidance

"No Flying Cars, But the Future is Bright" is an article that neatly sums up a few things I've been thinking about this week. Virginia Postrel wrote the article to talk about how the small incremental changes over the past few decades do add up to a big deal. The article itself was written in reaction to this piece, "Why We Can't Solve Big Problems," by Jason Pontin, in the MIT Technology Review. I'm not going to do a full summation of the two articles, you can choose to do that on your own, or not, but here are the bumper stickers:

  1. Pontin claims that the reason the future seems to be been deferred, the reason that we have Twitter instead of Transcontinental Supersonic flights, is that we have lost our will to progress. For a variety of political, and cultural reasons, we have lost the will to think big. NASA has plans that could take us to Mars by 2030 if we only had the political will that existed in the '60s. Global Warming might not be so catastrophic if we could just move past the political grid-lock of the present.
  2. On the other hand, Postrel claims that the future is doing just fine, thank you. Yeah, 2001 the movie from the 1960s looked a lot different than 2001 in reality. On many levels. But the improvement in efficiency, information exchange and medical technology do represent progress. A time traveler from the middle of last century would be impressed with the world he or she discovered.
I think the note of congratulation in Postrel's piece is probably not unwarranted. We live in a country with tremendous problems, problems thrown into harsh contrast this past weekend. However, we are still a country moving in the right direction. We reelected a progressive president from an ethnic group subjected to segregation and casual explicit racism in this country last century. It appears more and more certain that the outcome of the budget fights will be one favorable to social justice. While frustratingly ubiquitous, technology has allowed all of us to become part of something quite a bit larger than a town, city, state or even, arguably, a country. The change is one of scale and efficiency but it is still a change.

But Pontin's article is still compelling. I wonder if the value of such statements: "The future was supposed to be so much better!"is not so much their relative accuracy but simply that they keep moving us forward. Damnit, I've said it before, but we should be on Mars already. We should be doing more to protect this planet. And, the idea of violence as the primary solution to problems should be more and more unthinkable, unimaginable.

Maybe that's the value of speculative fiction in general, not so much a prediction, but a sign post pointing towards some other, weirder, better future.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
1 comment
Read more

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...
Post a Comment
Read more

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...
Post a Comment
Read more