Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction

219 Pages·2000·11.138 MB·English

by  Alan Sandison, Robert Dingley (eds.)

Histories of the Future
Histories of the Future
Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction
Edited by
Alan Sandison
and
Robert Dingley
We will not anticipate the past, so mind you, young people, - our retrospective
will be all to the future.
Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals
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* Selection and editorial matter © Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley 2000
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Histories of the future: studies in fact, fantasy and science fiction / edited
by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-23604-5
1. Science fiction, American-History and criticism. 2. Future in
literature. 3. Science fiction, English-History and criticism. 4. Future in
popular culture. 5. Literature and history. I. Sandison, Alan. 11. Dingley,
Robert, 1952-
PS374.F73 H57 2000
813'.0876209-dc21
00-041493
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
This collection of essays is dedicated to Professor I. F. Clarke,
reeipient ofthe Pilgrim Award and the Pioneer Award ofthe
Seience Fiction Research Assoeiation ofA merica, whose seminal
contribution to the study of future {iction has placed a
generation of scholars in his debt.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface x
Acknowledgements xv
Notes on the Contributors xvi
1 Introducing the Future: the Dawn of Science-Fiction
Criticism 1
Harry Harrison
2 History in SF: What (Hasn't Yet) Happened in History 8
Ken MacLeod
3 The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay's New Zealander and
the Spirit of the Age 15
Robert Dingley
4 Celluloid Scientists: Futures Visualised 34
Roslynn D. Haynes
5 Losing the Sense of Space: Forster's 'The Machine Stops'
andJameson's «Third Machine Age» 51
Beatrice Battaglia
6 Boys, Battleships, Books: the Cult of the Navy in US
Juvenile Fiction, 1898-1919 72
Bruce Brasington
7 American Dreams and Edwardian Aspirations: Technological
Innovation and Temporal Uncertainty in Narratives of
Expectation 91
Charles E. Gannon
8 Filing the Future: Reporting on World War Three 112
David Seed
9 The Map of Apocalypse: Nuclear War and the Space of
Dystopia in American Science Fiction 124
Brian Baker
vii
viii Contents
10 A New World Made to Order: Making Sense of the Future
in aGlobai Era 137
Alasdair Spark
11 Sign, Symbol, Power: the New Martian Novel 152
Robert Crossley
12 Stars hip Troopers, Galactic Heroes, Mercenary Princes:
the Military and its Discontents in Science Fiction 168
Tom Shippey
13 Terrible Angels: Science Fiction and the Singularity 184
Damien Broderick
Index 197
List of Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Gustave Don~, The New Zealander 18
Figure 4.1 Colin Clive as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein
(dir. ]ames Whale, 1932) 37
Figure 4.2 Greer Garson as Marie Curie in Madame Curie
(dir. Mervyn Le Roy, 1943) 46
Figure 6.1 The Daughter of the Consul 74
Figure 6.2 Manuel's Last Wave 75
Figure 6.3 The Modem Sea-Monster 81
Figure 6.4 '[ Wants to be a Torpedo-Man!' 82
Figure 6.5 'Are We Down-Hearted? No!' 83
Figure 6.6 'He Gets All the Fun!' 84
Figure 6.7 'Betsy's Battle Flag' 86
ix
Preface
'History', wrote R. G. Collingwood in The Idea ofHistory, 'is the life of the
mind itself which is not mind except so far as it both lives in the
historical process and knows itself as so living.' Writers of 'future fic
tion', by and large, exemplify this dictum with remarkable consistency.
One immediately thinks of George Orwe11 whose world-view was deeply
coloured by his conviction that the individualism he prized so much
had its origins in the ideological ferment precipitated by the Renais
sance and the Protestant Reformation. From his twentieth-century van
tage point, however, he recognises that the notion of the individual self
which these developments gave a voice to was, in reality, a cultural idea
which would wax and wane. It is a view he shares with others who wrote
speculatively about the future state of society such as Huxley and
Zamyatin. For these writers, observes Irving Howe in his essay 'The
Fiction of Anti-Utopia', 'The idea of the personal self ... is a fact within
his tory, the product of the liberal era, and because it is susceptible to
historical growth and decline, it mayaiso be susceptible to destruction.'
Orwe11 makes his perspective abundantly clear in 'Literature and Totali
tarianism':
We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to
exist - or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing
to have the illusion of being autonomous. Now in a11 that we say
about literature, and (above a11) in a11 that we say about criticism, we
instinctively take the autonomous individual for granted. The whole
of modern European literature - I am speaking of the literature of the
past four hundred years - is built on the concept of inte11ectual
honesty, or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare's maxim,
'To thine own self be true'.
Orwe11's concern for the past may be particularly explicit and sus
tained but there few writers of dystopias or utopias for whom this is
not a point de depart of one sort or another. As Ken MacLeod puts it in his
essay for the present volume 'History remains the trade secret of science
fiction': at the very least it is 'an inexhaustible source of plots and an
indispensable map of the ways in which societies work and how they
can change'. In fact, the past is something from which neither writers
x
Preface xi
nor readers can divorce themselves: ' ... we carry our history with us,'
writes Damien Broderick, 'tucked away inside our narratives and night
mares'.
All of the essayists in this volume are alert to the significance of
history in writing about the future. In this they are endorsing the prem
ises upon which Professor I. E Clarke founded the ground-breaking
research on stories, dreams and projections of the future which resulted
in such studies as The Tale of the Future (1961), Voices Prophesying War
1763-1984 (1966), The Pattern ofExpectation 1644-2001 (1979) and the
eight-volume British Future Fiction 1700-1914, now nearing completion.
Professor Clarke is cited in almost all of the chapters in this book, which
indeed he might be said to have inspired, and it is to hirn that the
collection is dedicated.
Given the large number, and the diverse interests, of contributors, a
compilation such as this is always going to prefer the 'relaxes' of eclecti
cism to inelastic editorial braces; yet each writer has, in his or her
specialist field, contributed to the historiography of the future.
Harry Harrison, in his introductory chapter, is indeed explicitly con
cerned with history - 'alternate history', which entails the alteration or
fabrication of some past event in order to show what might have been or
even what might yet happen. It is only in the last decade, he argues, that
'alternate history' has become established and recognised not merely as
a sub-genre of science fiction but as a literary practice in its own right.
'Alternate history' (to which Harrison hirnself is a veteran contributor)
projects the consequences that might have followed, or might yet fol
low, on permutations in the known historical re cord. Ken MacLeod,
while conceding the value of a knowledge of historical fact in writing
about the future, concentrates rather on 'the more obscure utility of
historical theories' . This leads hirn to consider briefly the influence of
cyclical conceptions of history in SF and he notes that SF writers have
been able to add only two notions that would have been novelties to
Aristotle - 'that of technological progress and that of feudalism'. From
there he goes on to discuss the ways in which two classic books, each
presenting 'both a summary and a theory of history', have influenced
his own work as a writer of SE
The cyclical historiography of an earlier age is also a central considera
tion in Robert Dingley's 'The Ruins of the Future', which describes a
resurgence in the iconography of apocalyptic destruction and shows
how Macaulay's figure of the New Zealander contemplating in some
unspecified future the ruined dome of St Paul's Cathedral becomes a
summary emblem of British cultural anxieties in the first half of the