The Future is Now
By Cindy Layton
It’s no coincidence that George Orwell’s 1984 is a bestselling book these days. Re-reading the futuristic classics in 2017 makes the details seem predictive yet quaint by today’s standards: the wall-sized televisions in 1984, the reality TV quality of the hunt for Montag, the rogue fireman, and the robotic Hound used to track him in Fahrenheit 451, but what gives them status as classics is both the timeliness and the timelessness of their message, not the devices the writer uses to make you imagine the future.
Whether attempting sci-fi, near future, apocalyptic or speculative fiction, writers frequently draw from the here and now to predict what’s to come and at the same time, use ideas about the future to comment on what is happening in the world today. They craft a future world to warn about the consequences of untended present dangers. At the same time, characters from the future reflect on the past to highlight the roots of our ignorant ways.
With the chaos that now ensnares the country, literary types are debating which of the dystopian novels best befit the current political situation. Is that, as an idea, worth debating? See the discussion here.
Some might say, with events unfolding at a speed meant to destabilize opponents to the point of dizziness, and concurrently feed a rabid base of supporters, the time for cautionary tales has passed. If you didn’t get the lesson from sophomore year you may not have time to catch up.
But, if any book hits the mark, the one that seems most prescient is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The author pulls details from religions and cultures of the past and present to create a repressive, male dominated society of the future. It is said that she carried around with her, news-clippings of stories to illustrate (re prove) that what she had written, in fact, already existed, and thus was not the stuff of imagination. And, although the society depicted in the story is the result of a future-dated overthrow of the government, in fact, much of the cultural and theocratic norms therein are insidious entrenchments, the roots of which we can plainly see in our everyday life and in our past: cultural biases beget incremental declines in rights which become institutional adjustments or laws.
Atwood made a distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction, the latter having a grounding in events that are in the realm here and now. “The science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.” Read the rest of her illuminating comments about sci-fi and speculative fiction here.
When writers want their future-based stories closer to truth, speculative fiction is a genre that says “that could really happen” or “that has already happened," a device that allows the message to resonate with the reader, for all its grounding in reality.
So, yes. As you write the future draw from the now. Craft a future world where the mistakes of long ago live on in your technology abundant society, but show us the timeless excesses of human nature that carried them there. Find the roots of the dangers and expose them for both our present and future selves.
The future is surely now.
