I often reflect on and philosophise about time. The reflections in this post have been initiated by a single sentence in Ensign Flandry. Persis d'Io tells the young Dominic Flandry:
"'You are the future.'" (p. 87)
I would once have thought without reflection that much sf, including the Flandry series, is set in "the future" and therefore that Dominic Flandry lives in the future. But nobody does. Flandry lives in (a fictional version of) our future but no one lives in his own future, except metaphorically. People can live "in the past" if they refuse to acknowledge change, "in the present" if they take no thought for the future and "in the future" if they focus only a future goal, not on present obligations, but, literally and physically, we can live only in the present, not in the past or future.
Every moment is the present to anyone who is conscious in that moment. We get the impression that our "present" or "now" moves from past to future, from birth to death, but it does not move anywhere. We move about in space and that motion takes time. We are present at 1:00 PM and at 2:00 PM and at every intermediate moment. We do not move from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM. No one will arrive at 1:00 PM and say, "We've missed Paul. He's already moved to 2:00 PM."
Back to Pesrsis d'Io and Dominic Flandry. She means (something like): "You are young enough that you will live into and will take a part in shaping (what we now call) the future." More simply, "You are the future." Persis and Flandry are living in what they call the present. It might help us to empathise with them if we (partly) think of them as inhabiting not "the future" but an alternative present.
Brian Aldiss points out in an introduction to James Blish's The Quincunx of Time that that text really is about the future because its protagonists, living in our future, receive messages from many different periods of their future. The stage directions for a play by Samuel Beckett begin by specifying that the scene is "in the future" although I do not think that anything in the play bears this out!
8 comments:
TV Tropes uses "Day after Tomorrow" as a term for this undefined-immediate-future setting.
CS Lewis' THT HIDEOUS STRENGTH was published in 1945 and the author's introduction describes it as set "vaguely after the war." In the future, just.
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Kaor, Paul!
While we are not literally MOVING thru time, I think it's fair to say we are aware of the PASSING of time from the present into the past. And we can at least think about the future and think about what might be done in the future.
Ad astra! Sean
Lewis -really- didn't like the sort of hubristic-technocratic mentality that became so prominent during the war.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I would agree with Lewis that hubris is not a good thing. And disagree with his dislike of a "technocratic mentality," which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.
Ad astra! Sean
Lewis idealized 'the old days', but without thinking things through. Eg., that the population of England in his day was grossly in excess of what its land could produce.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree Lewis did not understand the UK needed industry and commerce simply to support its population.
Ad astra! Sean
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