Anxiety of the Future #1: A Future, For Good or Ill
In my book blogging so far, I’ve taken a strong interest in post-apocalyptic literature, always a popular subject for speculative fiction though also one that writers from other genres like to jump into as well. I’ve written several entries over the years specifically devoted to discussing the various post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or otherwise grim depictions of the future or the end of the world. In recent years, this impulse has not dissipated and, in fact, the “anxiety of the future” as I called my first posting on the topic has only become stronger. I certainly have found no shortage of novels exploring the current sense of impending doom that’s been kind of hovering around for awhile, how difficult the coming years may be, and what challenges our society will face.
What is the appeal, particularly as reality seems to be getting closer and closer to the dystopian worlds, or even our world’s end, depicted in some of the stories I’ve read, as throughout the world political situations seem more fraught than any time in decades and the climate crisis worsens in front of our eyes? In some of the works of politics I’ve read in recent months, this very question was posed. Why focus on a dystopia or a breakdown of society when one could imagine a better world, free of the injustices of the present, a utopia. I can’t help but feel that a better world is possible. So why are so many writers imagining just how much things will get worse, diminish, or collapse? Some, obviously, succumb to a nihilist attitude, that the worse elements of humanity will always prevail. For some, though, I think these stories provide catharsis, a way to imagine how people will survive and make it through any hardships. It is a way to look at the worst aspects of our world today and either follow them to their logical conclusions or think about how the world could be different.
In coming months, I will tackle some of the fiction on my reading list that delve into these questions, imagining and confronting the challenges that are coming, and where we, as a species and a society, may end up, for better or for worse. In these upcoming entries, I’ll be focusing on specific topics, including “cli-fi” climate change focused sci-fi, politics, and even non-fiction. Throughout these entries, I’m going to be fairly broad in my definition of the “post-apocalyptic” or “dystopian” genre, even, perhaps, including works that are more “utopian.” Basically I’m interested in exploring speculative fiction describing a more or less near future world, how writers and artists envision the coming decades or centuries of our society. This may include works set during great catastrophes, either driven by human activity, a natural disaster, or some combination. It may include works discussing great political or cultural changes.
For this first entry, I will be discussing a few works I read in recent months that exemplify these themes, the fears and hopes for the future and, in particular, writers’ usage of the present and the past to reflect these present concerns to envision what type of future we may find. Time, for humans at least, is a difficult concept to grasp. We exist only in the present, but we can reflect upon what happened before to perhaps guess what will happen in the future.
A great place to begin, I feel, is with Peter Frase’s book length essay, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. In the book, Frase describes the “two specters … haunting Earth in the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation,” which while “in many ways diametrical opposites,” exemplify our historic moment, “volatile and uncertain, full of both promise and danger.” A fascinating discussion, in the book Frase attempts to use the “tools of social science” as well as speculative fiction to examine how we imagine our future possibilities and conflicts.
Frase, in the end, envisions four options for the future of our society and uses popular culture as a lens to sketch out how they may operate, to paraphrase a quote Frase includes from Rosa Luxembourg’s 1915 statement regarding the fate of Bourgeois society, “two socialisms and two barbarisms.” Communism, which indicates an abundance of resources thanks to technological advances coupled with a broad equality, Rentism, in which those same technological advances exist but stay shackled to our current economic inequality, Socialism, in which scarcity remains a obstacle but equality maintains society fairly, and Exterminationism, in which the elite finally decide the majority of humanity need no longer exist. All in all this is, I feel, a useful way to look at discussions of imagined futures, and I will be referring back to these “four futures” in my own discussions of pop culture dystopias/utopias.
A People’s Future of the United States is particularly effective anthology to look at these themes, with the diverse group of authors showcased in the collection really capturing the anxieties and hopes for the future of the United States during this uncertain period. Drawing from Howard Zinn’s quintessential history text, the tales collected in “A People’s Future” focus on what the coming years and centuries could mean for the marginalized voices of our country.
I was very impressed by the strong ideas each of the authors used to connect their stories to the themes of the collection, as well as the variety of styles they used. Victor Lavalle’s introduction drawing on his own experiences provided a great opening to the collection. Some authors drew upon a more allegorical approach while others use an academic or journalist lens, some satirical and some tragic. For the most part, though, the authors tend more towards the dystopian side of “the dystopia and utopian” dynamic. Thus, visions reminiscent of “rentist” or “exterminationist” futures predominate.
One of the authors included in A People’s Future, Malka Ann Older inspired me enough to check out her novel Infomocracy, first in her Centenal Cycle series. A unique novel, Infomocracy wasn’t quite like anything I’ve read before, I think. A sprawling and dense cyberpunk spy novel, Infomocracy immerses us in a world about fifty years in the future, in which a Google-esque ubiquitous tech corporation, known simply as Information, administrates a nearly global order of “micro-democracy.”
The world Older builds is a familiar one to today, with some hopeful and some worrying elements, with plenty of details that, taken together, paint a vivid picture. Centering the narrative on a handful of agents and activists working for their various parties or groups, the true focus of the novel remains the world itself, which Older describes organically through the characters. From what we learn, under Information, the world’s population has been separated into demographically determined administrative “centenals” of 100,000 people, each electing their own government to best suit the political desires of their various populations, leading to a patchwork of different governmental and economic styles. The government with the most representation in the world’s centenals has a “Supermajority” status, which is determined every decade. It is a fascinating picture of a future world, though Older’s world building sometimes takes center stage from her characters.
It is definitely a thought provoking setting full of intrigue and mystery, especially in the ways that it echoes trends in our own global society. Perhaps not fully fitting any of Frase’s four futures, Older paints a simultaneously optimistic and threatening future that makes it even more plausible as a future of our world. It can be a little easy to lose the thread of what’s going on in the story, but all in all, I really enjoyed Infomocracy and am looking forward to seeing what happens in the rest of the Centenal Cycle.
In contrast, Paolo Bacigalupi paints a much darker picture of a near future in Tool of War, the last entry in his young adult Ship Breaker series, one that hews distinctly into the exterminationist future. Like the previous entries in the series, Ship Breaker and the Drowned Cities, Tool of War is a disturbingly plausible and well realized vision of a world destroyed by climate change and resource shortages, leaving much of the planet under the control of competing multinational corporations, the last vestiges of the “accelerated age” the collapsed civilization in the first place.
Much of the series takes place in the war-torn, flooded ruins of the southeast and specifically the Drowned Cities, formerly known as Washington, DC, but Tool of War takes us to the sustainable enclaves of Seascape Boston. Drawing on elements that exist already in our present, from scrapping junk from more prosperous regions to recycle resources to child soldiers, the Ship Breaker series premises the problems the world already faces will only get worse as more of it falls into scarcity, only with those in power continuing to strengthen their edge with genetically engineered soldiers. All in all, Tool of War is a breezy, action packed story that brings the series to an explosive and satisfying conclusion, continuing with its discussions of the ethics of technology, the environment, and sustainability.
Similarly, Omar El Akkad’s fascinating novel American War also delves into a future in which many of the same problems that affect other areas of the world begin to strike into the heart of the United States of America itself as Americans begin to face the same issues that their government has inflicted on other nations historically. Resonating with our current climate of political and environmental uncertainty, American War follows a frighteningly plausible account of a second American Civil War through the eyes of one of it’s ravaged victims and later participants, exploring a bleak but all too possible future full of characters whose motivations ring true.
El Akkad uses his experience as a journalist covering the so called “war on terror” to give verisimilitude and realism to his vision of a war-torn, environmentally devastated American South. Instead of the Blue and Grey, this time it’s the Blues of the United States and the Reds of the MAG (Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the “Free Southern State,”) which seceded again to protest the Federal Government’s band on fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming climate change. As the two governments unload their arsenals on each other, especially drone strikes, rising waters claim much of the south.
Told through the point of view of a survivor several decades in the future, with much of the exposition delivered through dry excerpts of media accounts of the war, the bulk of it is seen through the eyes, and growing rage, of Sara T, aka Sarat Chestnut, whose young life comes to be defined by the war and its atrocities. Drones dropping random payloads on citizens, the torture of suspected rebels on the grim island remnants of Florida, sinister foreign agents hoping to exacerbate the conflict for their own gains, many aspects of the war echo the way the US has been waging war this century.
El Akkad’s writing presents a strong sense of setting and great, understandable characters, making the horrific things that happen to them all the more wrenching. This is especially the case with Sarat, as she struggles through some of the most awful effects of war, eventually coming to affect its development herself. All in all, a vivid, striking, terrifying, and affecting novel.
A second American civil war also sparks the plot of the last book I’ll discuss in this entry, John Michael Greer’s didactic utopian novel Retrotopia. A prolific author, Green writes reams of material dealing with such diverse topics as the occult, technology, ecology, and Lovecraftian fiction, but is most well known for his blogging on peak oil and the coming collapse of industrial civilization. So, when considering this novel, a depiction of a North American post-US state some four decades in the future, one must keep in mind that he has an axe to grind here, so that any world building, character development, or verisimilitude is secondary to the message.
Unlike the previous narratives I’ve looked at, which look to the present to imagine a future for it, Greer looks to the past. Retrotopia is a frame narrative following a diplomatic envoy to the Lakeland Republic (former states of the Upper Midwest) from the Atlantic Republic, the failing industrial wasteland of the Eastern seaboard. After the war and decades of self imposed isolationism, the Lakelanders have established a sustainable democratic nation state, in contrast to the collapsing states of the neighbors. They do this by repurposing older ways of doing things, like trolleys and print news and “masers” but also seem to smugly assume that things were just better in the past, aesthetically and morally. Characters exist only to lecture to the reader and relate how their system is better and how much modern art and music sucks. Greer uses these themes to deal with some important ideas of consumption, the environment, and what is meant by “progress”, but the characters, serving as mere mouth pieces for the author’s ideas, don’t feel alive and their country feels like a theme park. Still, there was just enough food for thought about how society could reorganize itself in the face of looming shortfalls and environmental change to keep me reading, but it’s just not that compelling overall.
In future posts on this theme, I’ll discuss how stories and storytelling are common themes in much dystopian and utopian literature, recalling the past and hoping for the future, “cli-fi,” stories in which the end occurs from something a little stranger than economic collapse, plague, or nuclear war, and ones inspired by the horror that our political lives have become. Plenty of material to keep us depressed but struggling on!
This entry’s thematic musical choice is “Sons and Daughters,” by The Decemberists, from their 2006 album The Crane Wife.