In much sf, including many works by Poul Anderson, we contemplate possible shapes of future society, in fact, to quote Wells, The Shape Of Things To Come or "A Story of the Days to Come." (For the latter, see here.)
However, "futures" is news as well as sf. Newspapers discuss the future for Europe, Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after a recent British referendum.
A story set in our future is set in its characters' present. However, The Quincunx Of Time by James Blish features characters living in our future and receiving messages from successive periods of their future:
"One of the many original features of this novel is that it does actually concern the future. Most science fiction, if it is not fantasy, is about some extension of the present which only by agreement do we call the future. It catches our attention because we see in it a mirror of the present day. Blish was after something different. Quincunx is like few other fictions, and does not resemble closely anything else Blish wrote."
-Brian Aldiss, "PEEP: An Introduction to The Quincunx of Time" IN James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), pp. 6-10 AT p. 7.
But the future, however alien, is a consequence of the present. Our actions affect it. Wells points out that, when The Shape Of Things To Come is being published, its protagonists are already young men. Poul Anderson's time traveler, Jack Havig, exploring the future, flees back to the twentieth century after glimpsing an awesome civilization, then builds that civilization.
18 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm inclined to agree more with you rather than Aldiss. The real future to come, however alien it might look to us, will still be a CONSEQUENCE of our times. So I would expect some things we know or believe to survive into the future--both good and bad.
I would say rather that Jack Havig helped to lay the FOUNDATIONS of that awesome civilization he glimpsed. Including incorporating even some of the work of the Sachem he overthrew (a great and able man, after all).
Sean
There's an old Army saying that "planning is all-important, the plan much less so".
We continually anticipate the future and plan for it, but the future we get is never the one we anticipate, and if you become over-committed to some schema or concept of it you're courting disaster -- the last century was replete with the consequences of that sort of utopianism, the delusion that we can "master" or definitively know the future and understand historical change like a mechanism.
And, of course, it's precisely when thinking of possible futures that the emotions become most intensely involved, because we long for or dread particular developments -- and it's then that "motivated reasoning" swings into action, making us select/reject information to confirm biases.
Theory is grey. Life is green.
Theory guides practice. Practice tests theory.
Those who implement a policy need to learn from its outcomes and to adapt the policy accordingly.
True, but it's also important to to be totally hypnotized by example, because no two instances where you implement a plan or policy will be completely identical.
There's another part to that old Army saying I mentioned: "The enemy, that dirty dog, also has a plan -- that's why we call him 'the enemy'."
Human interactions are always deeply contingent, because their outcomes depend on the agency of many individuals.
Mr Stirling,
I can certainly see how this applies to the history of the twentieth century.
Paul.
Sometimes two people cannot even agree when describing an event that they both witnessed.
That's -usually- can't agree. In law school, we were shown what we were told was the video of a bank robbery, and were asked, among other questions, to identify the robber's weapon.
There were many replies, ranging from "sawn-off shotgun" to "Uzi"; I just said "some sort of handgun".
In fact it was a banana, and the video was staged.
The point of the exercise was to show us in the most vivid way possible why eyewitness testimony was essentially worthless.
Another phenomenon we were shown was how, if you let witnesses talk among themselves, their version of the event will tend to a consensus -- and that consensus will be that of the strongest personality in the group.
It will -not- tend towards accuracy, though.
Human minds don't record facts, they construct narratives.
Constructing narratives is a fascinating process - celebrated by this blog. It is even more remarkable that that same human mind did eventually devise scientific method - and someone has tried to tell me that the whole of science is just one narrative among others.
You're right, it's an extraordinary cultural achievement -- but it's only happened once in the history of the human race, tho' the Classical and Hellenistic periods did sort of feel around the edges.
Science -can- function to get at actual truths; but it requires a very elaborate set of safeguards, and even so there are always cases where the 'motivated reasoning' kicked in without people noticing.
Clinical psychology is going through a painful reformation right now, with an ascendant faction demanding much stricter standards of replicability of results and so forth.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree! Which is why I dislike and distrust rigid and doctrinaire plans to build and impose a perfect, Utopian society. FAR more often than not we get only disaster, ruin, tyranny, or bloody wars as a result.
No, instead of a planned economy or a planned society, I prefer free enterprise economics and the limited state, whatever form it takes. Not only because we KNOW such ideas has worked but also because they make for more flexibility and adaptability in a society, more able to adjust to change while preserving its essential nature.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
The sheer UNSATISFACTORINESS of eyewitness testimony is one of the things I've noticed the better crime drama shows I've watched on TV inculcates. Such as CSI: LAS VEGAS. The investigators and technicians of that series focused on EVIDENCE, not testimony. Witnesses can either lie or simply be mistaken. Evidence does not lie.
Sean
Whenever someone tells me that science is -just- a narrative, I tend to ask: "And do they think that in Hiroshima?" 8-)
Though the interpretation of evidence -- and it always requires interpretation -- needs a strict adherence to procedure.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree, and I should have said so in my comment immediately above.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
I remember you mentioned replicability problems before.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And a true science arose only once in human history, for a variety of reasons discussed by Poul Anderson in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS?, from Western and Christian civilization. Mr. Stirling mentioned how Classical/Hellenistic sort of "felt around the edges" of developing a true science. I would add to that how some historians would include Sung Dynasty China (960-1279). China came very close, because of making various technological innovations, of developing a true science.
The rise of the West to world domination at least in part to mastering science and its possibilities, has forced the rest of the world to grapple with the practical and philosophical implications of science. Some non Western nations, like Japan, managed to adapt. But others, like many Muslim nations, have not. Even Iran, with its obsession on getting nuclear weapons, had to depend on hiring foreign technicians before it could start this program.
Sean
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