I believe that Trump’s US Space Force uniforms, alongside widespread talk on X and beyond of colonizing Mars and other impossible celestial feats, constitute the final frontier of the “culture wars”. Over the past few years, I have watched a new strain of delusional xenophobia quietly brewing in science-fiction online subcultures, and then begin to percolate through political conversation. It has now borne its putrid fruit.

After gaining some fame as the author of “far-future evolutionary fiction”, you might think it strange that I do not share the current unbridled optimism about the so-called “enterprising spirit of humanity” conquering the galaxy. There are two main reasons for my skeptical attitude: one is merely practical, the other is ideological.

Let us first consider the practical unlikelihood of “colonizing Mars”. The true believers on X speak of building cities on Mars or even terraforming the Red Planet — that is to say, using technology (somehow) to render it habitable to human beings. But in my opinion, the task is flat-out impossible. I wish this wasn’t the case, but when one considers the “when rubber hits the road” logistics of the whole deal, even supposedly basic terraforming is simply not feasible on Mars. Even if you somehow had the technology to find asteroids, crash them into Mars, wait for centuries for the resulting storm of debris and crashed ice to settle down, then spent some more time somehow brewing a breathable atmosphere out of the resulting murk — as die-hard advocates propose — the atmosphere of Mars is just too weak. Even if you pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, the oxygen would seep into space within a few centuries. You’d have to constantly import air just to keep the whole thing going. And it would take so long to import. The closest Mars gets to Earth is over 54 million kilometers away. In comparison the Moon is a little over 384,000 kilometers away.

Could it be that even Elon Musk, the greatest proponent of colonizing Mars, has finally realized this? In 2017, he stated he felt “fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me… Then build up the base, starting with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, and even bigger. And yeah, over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.” As late as 2025 he was doubling down on his claims, stating that he was “going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” But earlier this year, he changed tack, announcing that “for those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years”. Yet even if Musk is beginning to face reality, many of his devotees on X still refuse to.

I’m not ruling out the possibility of temporary bases on the Moon or maybe even Mars, but big cities where humans live for generations are impossible for logistical reasons. There’s also the temporal and organizational angle, which is rarely considered in these fast, wet dreams of technological achievement. Even if terraforming was logistically viable, we are talking about centuries-long, very resource-intensive commitments here. Now, look at the current state of the world: as things stand, we lack the social organization for cooperative endeavors that last more than a century. I don’t think even nation states can survive those chasms of time unscathed.

Some of the longest-enduring societies on Earth were primitive neolithic cities. Catalhoyuk in Anatolia lasted unchanged for 2,000 years, and matrilineal lines lived in the same place, sometimes for dozens of generations. This may show that enduring forms of social organization are indeed possible, but the sheer atavistic conservatism that enabled this resilience is directly at odds with the “space frontier” mindset. This line of thinking could inspire weapons-grade science fiction, featuring culturally-stunted neolithic farmers working — or being orchestrated from behind the scenes by a caste of hidden elites? — to build towards an off-world colony. But this would have no relation whatsoever to reality.

Then there’s the question of money. Imagine, somehow, that such an effort gets underway. A company, or more likely, a nation, starts launching asteroid-catcher ships. They seek, locate, and wrangle an asteroid, and in eight decades, they finally bring it in — whether to crash it into Mars for a terraforming effort, or to mine it outright for resources. But by then, the company funding the effort might not exist anymore. The government backing it could be gone. The very timetables involved with planetary terraforming are diametrically opposed to the disruptive, extractive capitalists who usually go about spouting such schemes. How are you going to pay for your Mars base over a centuries-long timespan? With company shares? Government bonds?

But don’t worry, such a scheme wouldn’t work under communism either. Not even the hardcore Chinese or Soviet varieties. Nothing short of a knowing, targeted abnegation of reason — perhaps in the form of a brain-washing religious cult — could force human beings to commit to a singular, non-immediate-reward-offering cause for so long.

Yet even the madness of a Mars colony seems level-headed compared to the ludicrous and much-hyped notion of a space megastructure. Popularized initially by Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, and marinated in the minds of more recent generations by the Halo game franchise, the most popular space megastructure vision is a ring-world — a band of solid material extending like a ribbon as long as the orbit of a planet around a sun. Theoretically, such a structure could offer a habitable space up to a billion times the surface area of Earth. Make the ring into a solid shell, and you get what’s called a Dyson sphere. Or make a slightly smaller cylinder sealed at both ends, rotate it to get gravity via centrifugal force and you get an O’Neill cylinder. This latter concept was popularized by Arthur Clarke and Genty Lee’s Rama series, and is usually touted as a workable design for an interstellar spaceship. There are even wilder ideas out there — extend the cylinder into a vast hollow spaghetti strand and you get a topopolis. Wrap that spaghetti around star clusters and you get a galactic topopolis!

These concepts make for some incredible “playgrounds of the mind” — and stories written about them are some of the best in the genre. However, even if the energy sources and tools to make them were available (they aren’t, and will never be, but read on), the sheer tensile strengths needed to keep such structures intact would mean that the raw material of ring-worlds or O’Neill cylinders would need to be as strong as the force that binds atomic nuclei together. That is just another way of saying that it is physically impossible.

Faced with facts, the space fantasist’s usual retort is to blurt out that oft-prattled half-truth: “they thought powered flight was impossible, too!” If you spar with them online, this particular response is so predictable that it feels like the unthinking reflex of some distasteful frog, flashing aposematic colors to potential predators. You prod them just to see it. The truth of the matter is that powered flight was seen as a distinct possibility from 18th-century Montgolfier balloons onwards — perhaps even earlier since birds fly. The naysayers’ claims have reached us simply because they were preposterous, even in their time.

Techno optimists believe that “tech” will solve any problem if applied, or argued for, hard enough. To them, everything is an engineering problem, or else an attitude one. They are right that humanity accomplished a monumental spurt of technological growth during the 20th century — but believing that “technology” is some miracle panacea that will keep making everything better and faster is akin to believing that a fast-growing toddler will be taller than a house when he is 20 years old. Almost by its very nature, growth stops. Technological plateaus are very real, and from a vantage point of “making life multiplanetary” we will always be on one.

Suggested reading

Elon Musk’s plan to save humanity

By Jacob Howland

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of naive people who believe that space colonies and megastructures are not only feasible, but also inevitable. Any casual sweep on X reveals unintentionally hilarious, cock-sure examples. I can’t help but wonder whether people like “Lunar Citizen” or “Space Koala” honestly believe in the delusional bullshit they are spewing? Or is it simply “signal boosting” aimed at their peers? Perusing such drivel on X is a strictly “do-not-engage” affair. Few of these characters acknowledge the immensity of the technical challenges that accompany their ideas; point them out, and you are immediately attacked for “spoiling the vibes”, or “spreading pessimism”. For people steeped in the “engineering mindset”, they certainly do rely a lot on vibes.

A strange sentiment animates many true believers. It is ostensibly a “belief in the human spirit” — frequently expressed with the motto “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” — but in practice it is a barely-concealed desire to eliminate “undesirables” who do not share their lethal blend of techno-optimism. The Venn diagram intersection between the “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” crowd, who believe in “humanity’s galactic manifest destiny”, and outright fascists is more crowded than one first imagines.

Let us then dissect their ethos, pinned before us like a nauseating xenomorph with acid for blood. The “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” sentiment (abbreviated as HFY hereafter), in my opinion, is basically a memetic parasite — a mostly fan-made sub-genre attached to science fiction. There are three major components of it.

The first comes from a really weird sub-fandom that developed around a meme based on a villain from James Cameron’s Avatar movies. I’ll quickly summarize: the Avatar series revolves around the “noble savage” world called Pandora, inhabited by the blue-skinned Na’vi. If you live like them and respect nature, the world to you is paradise. Meanwhile, the colonizing humans are portrayed as at best naive and at worst evil. In the end, there is a war between mechanized humans and the Na’vi, and the humans are sent packing back to their dying planet Earth.

The character that appeals most to the HFY sentiment in the Avatar franchise is Colonel Miles Quaritch, a military officer tasked with wiping out the Na’vi resistance so humans can mine their precious floating metals (named “unobtanium” in reference to Fifties engineering slang); or in the second and third films, so that they can suck out the brains of alien whales for an immortality drug. All over X you can see memes depicting the “Quaritch monologue” — a long chunk of text, pasted over badass-looking pictures of Colonel Quaritch. It goes something like this:

“Where are your marvels of engineering, your voyages of discovery, your great insights into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, we built wonders, we made great journeys, we forged epics — you have not. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…”

This quote is not from the film, nor from any of the franchise’s tie-in comics or computer games. Instead, this re-framing of the Avatar story comes from a fan-made Reddit thread from 2014. In this interpretation, Quaritch isn’t a villain serving galactic imperialists — he’s fighting for civilization and human supremacy. He sees the Na’vi not as noble savages, but as actual savages, and in these perverted fan edits, he is the franchise’s unsung hero.

The second component of the HFY spirit comes from the massive Warhammer 40,000 universe. Warhammer depicts a grim future where humanity is constantly at war with space orcs, space bugs, space demons, space pharaoh-zombies, and dozens of other factions. It is, essentially, dark satire. The Imperium of Man, the “pro-human” faction, is written almost like a list of everything not to do when running a society. It is an ultra-theocratic autocracy centered around the worship of an “Emperor of Mankind” kept in a vegetative state. A thousand people are sacrificed a day to keep him alive. The state religion considers associating with aliens to be a serious crime, to be punished with death. Space-age technology exists, but due to religious taboos forbidding innovation, little has been improved, and everything exists in a state of decay. This was a distinctly ironic, British, anti-theist, gallows-humor vision of the world. The earliest Warhammer art is literally indistinguishable from Viz-magazine style, post-punk protest art.

The HFY crowd doesn’t seem to get this. Its angle on Warhammer mostly thrives on fan edits — videos with impressive visuals of Space Marines marching while phonk music plays in the background. Usually, they come with cheesy, over-the-top messages — “Humanity first!”; “Suffer not the xenos to live!” etc. — completely missing the irony. They see the evils of the Imperium as necessary evils, and to them the “virtues” of this society — conformism, xenophobia, the violent will-to-power — are all lessons one can apply to real life. After all, they say, they are all for the advancement of the human species across the galaxy.

It goes without saying that one never meant to cheer for the Imperium of Man. You were supposed to laugh at it — a cynical laugh, sure, but a laugh nonetheless. You were meant to darkly enjoy its absurdity, its bleakness. But I don’t think you were ever meant to use it for political lessons.

The third part of the HFY chimera is based on Starship Troopers — and this brings us back to Trump’s US Space Force uniforms. Starship Troopers was originally a classic sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a dictatorship that takes over the world and then starts a galactic war against giant arachnid bugs. The book followed a man’s experiences in military service, and later on, his recollections of the war; but it was essentially the author’s commentary on the virtues of a meritocratic, militaristic society.

In 1997 the director Paul Verhoeven made a movie based on the book. But the film was a completely different artifact. Verhoeven didn’t want to adapt the book faithfully — he wanted to satirize it. The film became a cutting commentary on the nature of fascism. The characters start out as bright-eyed kids, but as the war progresses, they slowly morph into cartoonish and very clearly Nazi-coded villains. Any viewer worth his or her salt was meant to despair at how easily war reshapes society.

The film was completely misunderstood by the HFY crowd. To them, Starship Troopers was a call to arms. “Humanity is under threat! Crush the arachnids! Join the fight! Service guarantees citizenship!” The point Verhoeven was making about militarization and fascism was lost on them. The epitome of this sentiment was the 2018 YouTube video, “The Politics of Starship Troopers”, by Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. This immensely popular video, which had over a million views at the time of writing, argues that Verhoeven “misunderstood” Heinlein’s book. Instead of being a caricature of fascism or Nazism, the militaristic, human-centric society portrayed in the book and the movie was “merely” a quasi-libertarian one where people deprived of “meaning” in a lax, amoral, liberal world could “join an institution and really earn their own citizenship… by going out and building the world that they want to see”. When applied to present-day affairs, it’s clear who the “humans” are, and who the “arachnids” would be in the minds of this video’s intended audience. It is, in fact, darkly revealing to notice how stories crafted as entertainment products are now forming the nuclei of political sentiment. It is almost as if social expression has no conventional outlet left.

The sort of people who take Warhammer’s Imperium seriously, who root for Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, who want to see the Mobile Infantry squash bugs in real life, are more often than not the same people who espouse unlimited confidence in colonizing space and erecting megastructures all over the place. They possess the engineer’s fetish for applying unbridled power to solve perceived problems. Yet the trouble is, many of the problems we face today aren’t as straightforward as evil aliens in science-fiction memes. Some of our current troubles may simply be systemic, insurmountable however much power you use. Others, such as the looming threat of large-scale war or a climate-related emergency, may indeed require a level of restriction or hierarchy to solve — but going Space Marines on them will not be a wise approach. As the recent blunder in Iran has shown, these will be situations where cooler heads will need to prevail.

The truth is HFY is less a genre of science fiction than a memetic plague spreading through lower tiers of contemporary sci-fi fandom. It takes random bits from disparate works of military science fiction, strips away their complexity, and reduces their message to “strong-army-man shoots bug; humanity wins; civilization restored — voila!” Every problem is an enemy, every enemy can be destroyed, and sufficient application of force will put everything right. It is reductionist, lacking curiosity and intellectual depth. It brims with a cruel dislike of outliers, or anything that is otherwise “different”. HFY leads to the most dumbed-down distillate of xenophobia one can cook up. Its proponents are spiritually impoverished louts, grasping science fiction from the wrong end. They confirm the quote that is often attributed to Einstein but actually comes from The Medusa and the Snail, the 1979 science book by Lewis Thomas: “Space is infinite. Man’s knowledge of space is finite. The sum of our understanding is not yet sufficient for us to comprehend how vast the dimensions of our ignorance [are].”

Although this group continues to grow, there are signs that it may, at least in part, one day be astroturfed. Google Trends data for “space elevators”, “Mars colonies”, “ring worlds”, and associated topics shows a sudden upsurge in popularity in the last two years. This may have been caused by the X algorithm pushing “space optimism”, which in turn might have been used to bolster the public appraisal of Musk’s SpaceX stock earlier this year. The company turned out to be grossly overvalued, and recently its stock prices tanked — liquefying the pipe dreams (and the hard-earned cash) of the space bro crowd. The best laid plans of mice and men… And yet for now, HFY continues to rule X.

One of the greatest, but sadly lesser-known speculative-evolution artists is Karl Kofoed. In a career spanning years, he built up a dazzling universe of illustrated ecosystems and inhabited worlds through Heavy Metal magazine’s regular “Galactic Geographic” feature, which was later adapted into book form as the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003: Earth Edition. The most advanced race in the Galactic Geographic universe is a species of God-like sophonts called the WO. These beings are powerful enough to forge matter into pure energy, and erect megastructures thousands of kilometers in dimension. The most remarkable aspect of the WO, however, is the fact that they never spread beyond their home world. This is a rare thing in science-fiction literature, where off-world colonies and space empires are a dime-a-dozen. By being good stewards of their home planet, the WO are able to extend the lifespan of their civilization for hundreds of millions of years, and in doing so, advance considerably. Rather than being an obstacle to progress, their focus on their home planet was the key to their God-like power.

A pretty good lesson for all incorrigible expansionists, HFY rubes, and doe-eyed techno-fascists, don’t you think? The neat thing about science fiction literature is that it is vast — and within its gaudy halls there are as many (probably more) parables for integrity and hope than there are for the dumb, boyish lust for power.

It would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation after it had put forward such a radical anti-imperialist ideology. Luckily, he didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes across 12 different series that followed, Star Trek’s Prime Directive allowed writers and directors to explore the political and philosophical repercussions of such a concept, primarily its reliance on a prior transition to a humanist communism.

That Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode, the starship USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel containing human plutocrats who had paid large sums to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that aliens might find and cure them of whatever disease was killing them. After the crew of the Enterprise thawed and cured them, one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman, demands to contact his bankers and law firm back on Earth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is left with no option but to break the news to him that, in the intervening three centuries, much has changed: “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.”

Their conversation points to the reason why the Prime Directive is incompatible with the spirit of capitalism. As long as accumulation, fuelling the expansion of markets, is our society’s motivating force and ideology, imperialism is inevitable. To escape it, humanity must first eliminate scarcity of material goods – an elimination that, in the United Federation of Planets, was achieved on the back of the invention and widespread deployment of replicators: machines that convert plentiful green energy into any form of matter one desires, from food to gadgets to spaceships.

This is not exactly a novel idea. In 350BC Aristotle predicted that “if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus… chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society on machines like Star Trek’s replicators that liberate us from non-creative, soul-crushing labour. In one of his early writings, he imagines what will follow the invention of such machines:

“I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practice in theatre criticism after dinner — without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.”

Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who in the 24th century runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans for free because money is now obsolete — he is simply motivated by how much his neighbours appreciate the cooking. They also resonate with Picard’s answer to Offenhouse who, upon hearing that he was to be sent back to an essentially communist Earth, asks glumly: “What will happen to me? There is no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How do I live? What is the challenge?” “The challenge Mr Offenhouse,” replies Picard encouragingly, “is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself. Enjoy it!” Marx would have, I am in no doubt, applauded energetically.

Joy is not a word that naturally rhymes with communism, at least the Soviet variety. But pleasure is central to Star Trek‘s version of communism, which rejects the notion that escaping the logic of accumulation requires individuals to submit to a collective. Star Trek‘s writers make this point brilliantly by contrasting the Federation, made up of creative individuals who are free to choose their projects and partners, with the Borg — a dystopian cyborg collective made up of drones linked together in a beehive-like social order that expands by assimilating every species it encounters.

Star Trek rejects collectivism while still avoiding lazy critiques. We are treated to the traumatic reintroduction of a Borg drone to humanity, who experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the collective’s voice in her head. It is a reminder of how authoritarianism can be dangerously attractive to the lonely, but also of how important it is to pay the price of personhood.

But Star Trek does not just offer a vision of a splendid future. Like any other practical manifesto, it offers a theory of change: of social evolution founded on solid historical materialist tenets.

Consider, for example, the episode where the USS Voyager is locked in the gravitational field of a strange planet on whose surface time moves much faster than within the orbiting spaceship. The starship crew realise that during each one of their minutes the backward humanoids on the planet experience 58 sunrises. Thus, the crew enjoy a bird’s eye view of that society’s evolution, as if observing it unfold on fast-forward.

What they see is a rendition of humanity’s history — how technological innovations clash with superstitions and antiquated exploitative social relations, bringing about revolutions, progress, but also wars and environmental disasters. At times, it seems as if the species under observation, like humanity, might destroy themselves. But, in a happy ending, they too manage to overcome their imperialisms and their accumulative urges to press new technologies into the service of their common good.

Some of the most interesting insights occur at the edges of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.

More from this author

The EU cartel was designed to crush farmers

By Yanis Varoufakis

There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians, a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In one episode a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. I can think of no other TV programme which, within 40 minutes, can better educate the young on the horrors of the Holocaust — a reminder that good science fiction is as much about the past as the future.

Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station where different species mingle to trade, a meeting point between the communist, post-money Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station, there is a sleazy bar run by one of the hyper-capitalist Ferengi who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: he calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. For the Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion — it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. “War is good for business,” but “Peace is good for business too.”

To balance the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny, Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet ruled by bureaucratic centralism. An abducted doctor is forced to work in a hospital where he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index — a number compiled by a centrally controlled computer.

Star Trek interrogates our humanity through encounters between the Federation and other species. In truly Hegelian style, the planting of alien officers inside Federation spaceships forces humans to reflect through the eyes of those with a sharply different philosophy and outlook. There are numerous examples, but the one face-off most pertinent to our own times is what follows when a supersmart android, known as Data, is introduced on USS Enterprise.

Data has no capacity to feel but nevertheless is driven by the urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data carefully studies our behaviour, and our art. He becomes not only a much-appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from today’s perspective, a character that serves our thinking about AI.

Suggested reading

The very eccentric birth of Labour

By Boyd Tonkin

Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights comes to the fore. When a Federation laboratory requests that Data agrees to be disassembled for the purposes of replication, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and thus retained, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure,” he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that Data has no choice, Captain Picard demands that the question — of Data’s agency — be taken to court.

The trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android is not sentient. Data, therefore, has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism. Instead, it acknowledges that simulating sentient beings, as Chat-GPT does already, is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion in which it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness like Data.

More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and technophobia. For example, the Federation heavily regulates genetic engineering, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities as done in eugenics. On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire, the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life — Captain Picard’s defence of Data on the trial concludes with the point that “Starfleet was founded to discover new life”— with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.

The United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the starship crew return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans abuses the ship’s doctor in what is a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell holds the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with. Its own secret services, outfits such as Section 31, also pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.

Suggested reading

Ballard predicted the collapse of the middle class

By Paul Heron

The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.

In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared to dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagined a world where mankind’s “economic problem” had been solved:

“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity has edged closer to an early Star Trek episode in which “cloud minders” live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines?

Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-optimists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.

Today’s moribund Left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.

Which might make what I’m about to argue seem perverse, but here goes. Ballard possessed no supernatural gift of foresight. He was an exceptional writer — one of the greatest of the 20th century — and the possessor of both a powerful imagination and a rare intellectual courage. Most pertinently, he was an extremely acute cultural analyst and observer. He was not a fortune teller. No science-fiction writer is. He was something much more powerful: a diagnostician.

The very idea of prediction is a consoling notion we use to make sense of the terrifying randomness of life and the singular direction in which time’s arrow flies. The notion that science fiction can defy these brute facts of thermodynamics is thrilling: if only we can unearth the correct tracts, we will know what will come to pass. E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” is an early example often claimed for the futurological argument. It seems uncanny that, as early as 1909, the author who would become famous for his novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End predicted a world in which, due to some form of environmental disaster, humans communicate trans-globally via screens. How did he know? What had he seen?

What he had seen — and experienced — was the telephone, which was proliferating through the more sophisticated houses of London in the Edwardian period, in which Forster hung out, and which allowed people to talk to each other without leaving their homes. He’d also read H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, and, with some justification, was critical of its promotion of an oligarchic, technocratic society. So, he wrote a story that depicted an automated society in collapse. In short, Forster’s “vision” was responsive to material and literary conditions at the time he was writing: all writers are embedded in their present, regardless of which direction they orient their imaginations.

Ballard, like Forster, regretted the reach of Wells into techno-utopia, declaring: “Great writer though he was, I’m convinced that H.G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction.” He complained that Wells had provided “a repertory of ideas that have virtually monopolised the medium”. Indeed, in Wells, we find a stock of immensely influential science-fictional concepts — most of which no one would describe as prescient. There was much speculation about life on Mars in Wells’s time: Giovanni Schiaparelli’s drawings of the red planet, and descriptions of “canali”, mistranslated as “canals”, had led to newspaper front pages claiming to have identified traces of civilisation. Wells had responded to these imaginatively in The War of the Worlds. As Forster did, Wells was extrapolating from concepts current in the scientific discourse of his day. But hus speculative imaginings enjoyed rich lives in fiction, not reality. Time travel remains physically impossible, and there is no life on Mars. Science fiction is certainly a generative form, but its ideas most frequently generate more science fiction.

More from this author

The gladiatorial art of the quiz show

By Mark Blacklock

One qualification, perhaps: we should not think of science-fiction writers possessing supernatural foresight, but they can be directly influential on the present-day developments that shape our futures. Elon Musk cites Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as an influence on his intellectual development: “It’s sort of a futuristic version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Let’s say you were at the peak of the Roman empire, what would you do, what action could you take, to minimise decline?”

Jeff Bezos, meanwhile. not only reads and watches science fiction but also hangs out with canonical cyberpunks and follows their advice. As James Davenport, who spent time with Bezos recorded: “[Jeff] says to Neal Stephenson, ‘I’ve always wanted to start a rocket company, that’s always been my dream.’ And Neal Stephenson just said, ‘Do it. Do it today.’ And soon thereafter, he did.”

Two researchers at the University of Cambridge, Sarah Dillon and Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, recently interviewed 20 leading AI researchers about their reading habits. The results were fascinating. One interviewee “noted that William Gibson’s Neuromancer fed into his team’s research when it was published. Whilst it did not give them their research ideas, ‘it did make us think a bit about what would be a cooler interface’”. Another “talked about finding inspiration for his AI research in two books in particular, which he described as ‘the foundations of my AI-related reading’: Ursula Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) and Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (1965).” If science fiction is not in the business of predicting the future, then, it can claim to directly influence it.

It’s heartening to think that the anarchist Ursula Le Guin might be shaping what products we end up interfacing with, and we’d all do well to read more William Gibson, who has the awareness of the cyberpunk: he understands that the real future cannot be nearly as slick as the one so often depicted by science fiction. His story, “The Gernsback Continuum”, shows the leaking of the streamlined, imagined rocket-ship futures of the science-fictional jet age into the grimy real world; he once wrote: “The capital F future isn’t going to arise.”

Ballard, too, was always dismissive of that rocket-ship version of science fiction. He was, on occasion, invited to speculate on the future: twice by Vogue in the late Seventies. On the first occasion, he imagined the dream house of the year 2000, in which “Mrs Tomorrow will find herself living happily inside her own head. Walls, floors and ceilings will be huge, unbroken screens on which will be projected a continuous sound and visual display of her pulse and respiration, her brain-waves and blood pressure.”

It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and there’s little doubt that Ballard identified key directions of travel: our attachment to mediating and recording our own lives through technology; the solipsistic privileging of our own emotions within such environments; and the voyeuristic desire to watch others. But he’s clear that he’s working from what’s happening at the time of writing: “However fanciful all this may seem, this transformation of our private lives with the aid of video-systems and domestic computers is already at hand. Micro-computers are now being installed in thousands of American homes, where they provide video-games and do simple household accounts.”

In the second Vogue piece, imagining life in O’Neill space stations, Ballard went route one:

“Will we ever discover alien life in outer space? The answer, almost certainly, is: Yes — in the year 2022. It will be 35 years old, female, come from Pasadena, Dusseldorf or Yokohama, be married to an astrophysicist, adore Doris Lessing and David Hockney, and live in a six-mile-long metal cylinder halfway between our own planet and the Moon.”

We can judge this one pretty clearly, being just the other side of 2022: Nope, didn’t turn out that way. Not that we should ever read Ballard literally, but instead note his “extreme metaphors”. His point in the previous line is that the alien life is us. Ballard’s futures were guided by Freud and the surrealists; he understood that we’re always besieged by unconscious desires, which we project onto the exterior world. That we live inside our own heads, a landscape that looks a little like certain early 20th-century paintings. Never more so than in his early disaster novels, which are so frequently claimed as predictive of climate disaster, but which more closely resemble strange dreams set inside the canvasses of Giorgio de Chirico.

Suggested reading

Welcome to Philip K. Dick's dystopia

By David Samuels

None of this is to say that he didn’t enjoy playing up to the role demanded of his public image. One of his favourite soundbites was that the scenarios he imagined were in fact “dangerous bends ahead”. That’s Jim the adman, writing copy for a specific audience, deftly fending off readers who might not wish to grapple with the more challenging moral ambiguity of his extreme scenarios. Dig a little deeper, though, and he does tell us what he really thinks about prophets. In a diary piece written in 1999, he wrote:

“I remember in the Sixties being rung up by journalists asking: ‘What will sex be like in the Seventies?’ They expected something strange and unimaginable, but looking back after 20 years, it all seemed much the same. A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won’t happen.”

Ballard repeatedly told us that his imagination was the greatest tool he possessed, but he appreciated its limits. The technologies he was interested in are those we take for granted and the aspects of our lives he studied are those we prefer not to notice. To call him a prophet is to cheapen his achievement; he was in fact a skilled analyst of the present, who placed us all on the couch.

But what if a different crisis gets us first? What if the biggest problem we face is that billions of people are getting old at a faster rate than babies are being born? In Italy there are so few children that schools are “vanishing like the melting glaciers”. In Japan, adult nappies have outsold the baby variety for over a decade. Indeed, there is such a superabundance of waste from incontinence products that one town has started burning them for fuel. The problem is global: for countless millennia, forming families was the most intuitive thing imaginable, but no longer.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a problem. The glass-half-full take is that the declining birthrate has finally put our Malthusian terrors to bed. The threat of exponential overpopulation has corrected itself: for instance, China’s population is set to drop from 1.4 billion today to 800 million by 2100. The glass-half-empty view is that there won’t be enough young people to sustain this vastly expanded older population. The advice offered by economists is simple and utilitarian: countries that are depopulating must increase immigration.

But the materialist nature of today’s discussion, where it is being had, obscures the many profound existential questions posed by the impending arrival of a grey planet. In fact, there is only one forum in which these are being addressed: science fiction. Here, a handful of stories have tried to imagine what a world without children would look like.

The most famous of these thought experiments is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, based on the PD James novel, in which an ecological catastrophe has rendered the human race infertile, and civilisation stands on the brink of collapse. But while Children of Men is bleak enough, and contains generous helpings of man’s inhumanity to man, it is only set 18 years after the last birth. As a result, there are still plenty of young people about, among them a vigorous 40-ish-year-old Clive Owen, who ultimately discovers a mother and baby. The film ends with their rescue, and choral music, and the sound of children laughing. Crisis averted!

But if Children of Men loses its nerve, ultimately resisting the full ramifications of its premise, the same cannot be said of Greybeard, a novel by the British Grand Master of science fiction, Brian Aldiss. Written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it imagines that a nuclear catastrophe has left all humans and many animal species infertile. Crucially, Aldiss begins his story half a century after the event, when humanity is on the verge of extinction. The youngest people in the novel are Algy Timberlane, aka “Greybeard”, and his wife, Martha, who are both 56. Most of the characters are in their seventies or older.

More from this author

The heroic failure of Cumbernauld

By Daniel Kalder

This enables Aldiss to explore the nature of an aging planet in detail. His first assumption is that a physically frail, and therefore vulnerable, community is a much more fearful one. At the start of his novel, Greybeard and his wife have spent a decade living in the village of Sparcot, which is run by a petty local tyrant. They have accepted his irascible rule in exchange for the promise of security. The residents squabble and complain about toothache while living in fear of invading Scotsmen and, of all creatures, stoats — one of the few species of mammal to have escaped the catastrophe with their reproductive organs intact, meaning they proliferate. The choice of animal is inspired: if Aldiss’s protagonists had feared feral dogs, their weakness would have been less obvious; how much worse that this diminished population cannot control a pest that nobody today gives a second thought. How alarming that Aldiss’s prophecy is starting to come true, on depopulated Japanese islands where cats vastly outnumber pensioners.

Loss of strength is only part of the problem, however. Civilisation is also undone by a collective loss of will. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the survivors hope that the infertility is a transient phase from which they will recover. Then, as the years pass, and it becomes clear that there will be no children to inherit the fruits of their labour, people lose interest in maintaining society beyond the bare necessities required to survive. The economy collapses and the result is a simpler, reduced world, of villages without businesses and new technologies. But this is not the pastoral dream of today’s “degrowth” proponents; it is an impoverished, dilapidated world that has given up on itself, and awaits oblivion.

Darkest of all, however, is Aldiss’s take on how this ageing remnant of humanity would treat children. Ownership and exploitation are the dominant attitudes. Initially, a global effort is made to gather the surviving minors in three “Childsweep” centres, where there are “three psychiatrists to every child”, to help them cope with the trauma of the world they have inherited. But like any scarce resource, the children become the subject of an international dispute, which leads to a catastrophic war. When, decades later, Greybeard arrives in a village which has a handful of mutant children, he finds that they are periodically put on display as a “treat” for the inhabitants of a village. Later still, when he discovers a few healthy youths, the first one he meets is being kept as a sex slave by a con man. Aldiss’ bitterness may be partly explained by the fact that when he wrote the book, he had lost custody of his children following a divorce, but his point is universal: as we saw during the pandemic, when humanity is under pressure, it does not treat its children well.

Of course, Greybeard is extreme by design. I’m not arguing that our leaders should abandon all thoughts of climate change and prepare for a crumbling world overrun by feral stoats in which most adults abuse the dwindling number of children. But the thing about the real world, as opposed to the world inside a novel, is that we can have many intersecting (and insurmountable) problems at the same time. Today’s climate change activists think too much like novelists: they are performing one simple thought experiment, by imagining our world as it is now — the same balance of young and old, the same technologies, the same governments — and extrapolating the future along one central theme, in search of a tidy resolution. But the warmer planet they imagine will also be a grey planet, filled with elderly people.

There will be many more Joe Bidens unable to make it to the end of a speech or climb stairs unaided, many more Mitch McConnells freezing before the cameras, many more geriatric pop stars miming to songs they first performed 50 years earlier. And they will be the lucky ones. A great many others will be alone, ill, vulnerable, surrounded by decaying infrastructure, while rats and other creatures run wild. In this context, we may want to reconsider some of our anxieties about the AI apocalypse. Indeed, this could be one area where it would benefit us to be a little less existential and a little more materialist. An older, depopulated world will clearly require a far higher degree of automation and augmentation; there’s a reason that Japan is known for its robot technology.

Aldiss’s conceit rules out some possibilities that are open to us, of course, including the economists’ favourite: immigration. But you don’t need to be a science fiction grand master to imagine how this policy might go awry. They are assuming that older, poorer countries will remain attractive destinations for the inhabitants of younger ones; that there will not be significant backlash from the existing populations; that the immigrants themselves will not adopt the customs of their host societies, stop reproducing, and also grow old.

Suggested reading

The rise of baby doomers

By Jennie Bristow

Those countries that cannot stomach more immigration will seek to incentivise larger families. This is the approach of Hungary, which grants mothers under 30 an exemption from income tax. Historically, however, the idea of rewarding families for great feats of reproduction has had mixed results. And the time may be coming when no matter how attractive the tax breaks, couples simply can’t have children. Sperm counts are plummeting worldwide. Scientists have suggested that everything from obesity to “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” may be responsible, but without firm conclusions, humans may yet end up like French bulldogs, unable to reproduce without direct medical intervention. And of course, some communities opt for extinction over change: today, for every 150 Parsi Zoroastrians born in India, 600 die, but the community refuses to recognise the children of women who marry outsiders. In the 200 years of their existence, the Shakers have had ample opportunity to reconsider their celibacy, but have declined to do so, relying on conversion to keep the numbers up. Today, two remain.

You would think that — given its inevitability — we would put a bit more effort into imagining this grey new world. But Greybeard is one of very few attempts to confront a planet in which most people are very, very old. In politics, the story is worse than in literature. All the signs are that we would rather not think about it: China, for instance, stopped reporting on its fertility rate in 2017. Perhaps this is because we have already made our decision: like the Parsis, we are not going to have more children, and so all we can do is wait for the great die-off to unfold.

The joke was on me, I thought. Or maybe the joke was on Calvin Klein. Faced with a grotesque sight that I could just as easily have viewed in my own bathroom mirror, I resolved to eat less and exercise more often — and to stop buying Calvins.

But was the billboard actually a joke? On reflection, I had my doubts. If there is one aesthetic experience that defines the present, it is the feeling of being under more or less constant attack by the anti-beauty impulse — the kind of deliberate ugliness that I saw on the billboard. Examples of this style of defacement are everywhere, and particularly in commercial ad campaigns, from Calvin Klein ads to the cover of Sports Illustrated. Their omnipresence suggests that something more radical is afoot than an attempt to expand beauty standards by, say, showing us that men and women of different races, genders and sexual preferences might all partake of a common, more inclusive set of ideals. There is in fact an overriding difference between appreciating the beauty of men and women of different races and physical types, which at this point in history seems like a lesson that adequately-educated children learn in grade school, and asserting that a grossly overweight woman on a motorised chair — as featured on another Calvin Klein billboard — is a beauty object. The former expands and enriches a common ideal of beauty; the latter says that beauty doesn’t exist, shouldn’t exist, isn’t important, is the enemy of virtuous behavior and thought.

The anti-beauty impulse is iconoclastic, not in the playful mid-20th-century sense, but in the literal sense of destroying icons. It is dour, tight-lipped and totalising. Sex is forbidden, as are desire, playfulness, and pleasure. What’s left is the feeling of someone spitting in your face and forbidding you from wiping it off. The aim of such gestures is not to expand anyone’s aesthetic. It is to punish you for being attracted to what is now forbidden.

Iconoclasm has its own history. A few years ago, I visited John Calvin’s church in Geneva, whose brutalist interior was achieved by smashing the statues that had once been inside. I am not a Catholic and have only a passing acquaintance with the glories of Renaissance art, but still, it was hard not to feel the destructive force that had been unleashed in the interior of what had once been the city’s largest cathedral, even as a children’s choir sang hymns in the background. As the authors of that particular bout of heady vandalism no doubt intended, it was not a particularly peaceful or pleasant experience. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

More from this author

How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

The idea that destruction should be pursued programmatically, as a virtue, with beauty as the enemy, is what separates puritanism from punk, an aggressive aesthetic that rejected prevailing standards of beauty and other norms and instead sought to release energy by smashing things. Punk was a studiously primitive expression of the life-force. The Calvinist vandals of Geneva, like their latter-day successors in the Taliban, sought to repress the life-force by denying the validity of any experience or standard outside their own fixed notions of virtue.

The assault on beauty that we are seeing today is more puritan than punk; its authors defend their actions as expressions of the millenarian urgency of their supposedly secular beliefs. When climate activists deface paintings by Monet, Klimpt, Vermeer, Picasso, Van Gogh and others, they are not merely attacking paintings; they are saving the planet. Activists in the United States who tear down sculptures memorialising Confederate war dead are not merely attacking works of art, or rejecting the achievement of peace between warring sectional armies; they are posing as warriors locked in a death-struggle with racism and white supremacy. Putting photographs of overweight women, or trans women, on the covers of men’s magazines is said to be a way of fighting misogyny or saving trans lives, even as it is also obviously a way of expressing contempt for the readers of those magazines and the universe of desire they inhabit.

More from this author

Welcome to Philip K. Dick's dystopia

By David Samuels

The motivation behind these acts would be recognisable to the inhabitants of Calvin’s Geneva: to attack images and objects considered by others to be beautiful or sacred. Why beauty should find itself the target of a culture-wide rage for destruction is a question to which no single answer is likely to suffice. A short list of such candidates might include: widespread feelings of misery and powerlessness caused by rampant inequality; the disillusioning reach and effect of new technologies; and the desire to build a better world, save the planet, and put an end, once and for all, to racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny and other barriers to equality.

A more sweeping answer can be found in the Russian science-fiction novel We, written nearly a century ago by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is set in a future utopia run by engineers whose rage for equality mediated by algorithms would be familiar to many of today’s puritanical activists. The novel is presented as the diary of a state mathematician named D-503, who falls in love with a woman named I-330, whose particular combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. D-503’s feelings of attraction for I-330, and his desire for an exclusive relationship with her, in turn draw him into a conspiracy against “the Only State”. Zamyatin’s totalising utopia is a centralised surveillance state governed according to a highly-advanced mathematics of happiness incarnated in the Integral, a giant computing machine/spaceship that will soon “force into the yoke of reason other unknown beings that inhabit other planets, perhaps still in a wild state of freedom”.

Love has been banned by the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust. Sex has not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code: “Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object.” Citizens are issued ration books of sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to spend a “sex hour” together and to lower the shades in their glass apartments, becoming temporarily invisible to surveillance, which is how the romance between D-503 and I-330 begins.

Suggested reading

England's other Saint George

By Will Lloyd

We is chiefly known today in the West as the inspiration for Orwell’s most famous anti-utopian fiction, 1984. Orwell’s reading of We was heavily coloured by his revulsion for both the fascist and communist real-world versions of the one-party state, which he had come to loathe during the Spanish Civil War. “The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 review of We. “Now the Single State has restored [mankinds’s] happiness by removing his freedom.”

Yet key aspects of Zamyatin’s book puzzled Orwell. “Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable,” Orwell observed. “What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country,” he concluded, “but the implied aims of industrial civilization.”

Yes, but. If the opposition between happiness and freedom that Orwell found in We became the central theme of 1984, Zamyatin had introduced a third term, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human than the desire for freedom: Beauty.

By eliminating freedom and all causes of inequality and envy, the Only State claimed to guarantee infinite happiness. The real threat to this ideal isn’t sexual envy, which is rampant in the Only State, or the existence of an invisible elite that in fact rules the city. It’s beauty. For D-503, dance is beautiful, mathematics is beautiful, and the contrast between I-330’s black eyes and black hair and white skin is beautiful. Beauty is the answer to D-503’s urgent question, “What is there beyond?”

More from this author

Test article

By Park MacDougald

The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, was not reconcilable with utilitarian calculations of social justice. Beauty is unequally distributed, and therefore manifestly unjust. At the same time, no one loses anything because someone or something outside themselves is considered beautiful by others. My perceptions of beauty in a person or a piece of music are entirely my own, yet at the same time they in no way preclude others from the same enjoyment; the enjoyment of beauty is therefore at the same time wildly unequal yet universally available.

Beauty, Zamyatin believed, was an inherently stubborn human force that is rooted in our biology, and therefore in external absolutes, like the mathematical ratios that determine D-503’s perceptions of the beauty of I-330’s face, which are at the same time both fixed and irrational. It is something real we perceive in the world, and not, or not merely, an arbitrary “construct” determined by power relations. The ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, beauty is key to our humanity.

Human beings want what we want because we are human. Therefore, we will never stop seeking beauty, and will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder our desires according to the logic of machines. Machines can be programmed to weigh out exact measures of equality, but they can’t be programmed to feel what humans feel when looking at other humans in their underwear. Nor can machines feel envy, spite, or the impulse to desecrate things that other people find beautiful.

It is no accident, then, that in a moment when Zamyatin’s vision of a technologically-advanced society whose chief value is equality seems to be within our reach, that beauty would present itself as an obstacle to that vision — and as a primary target of egalitarian rage.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

Suggested reading

Big Tech's threat to democracy

By Matthew Crawford

Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

* * *

Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.

The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.

Suggested reading

Will we escape our age of failure?

By Martin Gurri

The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.

A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.

What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.

What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.

Suggested reading

The West is homeless

By Paul Kingsnorth

Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.

“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.

* * *

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting  the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.

Suggested reading

How Big Tech seduced the Left

By Geoff Shullenberger

Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.

One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe  — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.

No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.

Suggested reading

Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”

Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.

What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.

A name from the pages of legend: one of the finest independent bakers in all Hertfordshire! Surely, surely…

And it was then, peering through the glass, that she saw it. A squat golden figure, grinning and goggle-eyed. There could be no mistake: here was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, made entirely of marzipan.

Sarah knew at once that this was a gift from the gods. Only a few weeks before her father had taken her younger sister, Mary, to see E.T. at the cinema. Both had wept buckets. What was more, her father adored marzipan. She looked for a price tag. One pound seventy-five. Bargain!

If you’re wondering how I know all this, the answer lies in an online report on the BBC’s “Beds, Herts and Bucks” news page a few weeks ago, though I may have added a little fairy-tale stardust of my own. The marzipan E.T. figure still exists, which is why it made the news. As Jim’s daughter Mary explained, she found it after his death last year, perfectly preserved. A miracle? Well, not quite. Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it. “I am now its keeper,” she added, “and I’ll never eat it either.”

For those of us of a certain age, the only thing more terrifying than the prospect of eating 40-year-old marzipan is the realisation that fully four decades have elapsed since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. ruled the box office. I was almost eight when my parents took me to see it. I well remember my fascination with the basic premise — dwarfish alien botanist, disastrously stranded in the cultural desert of suburban California, is desperate to find his way home — and can even more vividly recall my utter desolation when it seemed the ugly little fellow’s race was run. And I’m happy to report that Spielberg’s film has lost none of its power. We watched it with my son during one of the lockdowns, and my wife’s decision to invest in a huge packet of tissues was richly vindicated. (He cried too, but not as much as me.)

Suggested reading

This is Tolkien's world

By Dominic Sandbrook

The story behind E.T. is well known, and has never better been told than in the review by Time’s critic, Richard Corliss, a few days before the film’s release in June 1982:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia. His house was just like everybody else’s house; his family’s car and dog and swimming pool were just like everybody else’s too. But little Steven’s dreams were different. He dreamed of telling the stories of his strange land — wonderful tales of his home and his school, his parents and especially his friends — and making them shine like new. So every night he would tiptoe outside his ranch-style house and make a wish on the brightest star in the suburban sky. Over and over he would whisper, “Help me tell the story …”

E.T. is a fairy-tale about growing up in suburbia and dreaming of the world beyond. It’s a film about feeling different and struggling to fit in, about the outsider hiding within us all. It’s also, very famously, a film about a child — the hero, Eliott — wounded by his parents’ divorce. Spielberg had been deeply hurt by his own parents’ separation in the early Sixties, and had actually been working on a fictionalised version of their story before he turned to E.T.. And even now, 40 years on, it remains a sublimely affecting account of what family trauma does to an impressionable child — all the more so because it is, of course, a child’s escapist fantasy.

But E.T. is also very obviously a film of a particular era. The late Seventies and early Eighties are much in vogue at the moment. ABBA — peak years 1976 to 1981 — have retaken the stage to rapturous applause, albeit in digital avatar form. Star Wars’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, created by Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas in 1977, now has a Disney series of his own. A fourth Indiana Jones film, continuing the story Spielberg and Lucas began in 1981, is out next year. Even Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which currently dominates the box office, tries to recapture the spirit of the mid-Eighties, Ronald Reagan’s shiny, swaggering, shoulder-padded heyday, when it was forever morning again in America.

There’s an obvious generational explanation for all this. If, like me, you remember sobbing at the cinema as E.T. lay dying, then you’re probably in your late forties or early fifties, easy prey for the nostalgia industry. Life is more complicated than it used to be: more hectic, more stressful, more fraught with compromise and disappointment. As the accountants at Disney’s streaming service know only too well, it’s natural to yearn for the simplicity and innocence of childhood. When you watch E.T. now and feel the tears pricking at your eyeballs, are you crying for the alien, or for Elliott — or for yourself?

Suggested reading

Test article

By Dominic Sandbrook

Were the late Seventies and early Eighties really a more innocent time, though? No, of course not. Flick through the pages of any newspaper and you see stories just as heart-breaking and hair-raising as any you’d find today: revolution and war in the Middle East, bloody repression in Poland, a child-abuse panic in America, terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. For Spielberg’s generation, the scars of Watergate and Vietnam were still painfully raw – as were memories of the Holocaust, which his Orthodox Jewish parents had often discussed with him when he was growing up. “I was a scared kid,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone in 2007. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives.”

But there was a palpable difference between then and now, and you need only rewatch a film like E.T. or the original Star Wars to see it. For all Spielberg’s talk about private horrors, both films are fundamentally, unselfconsciously optimistic. People are decent, Han Solo has a heart of gold, and tomorrow really will be brighter than today. In E.T., for example, much of the tension surrounds a shadowy group of government agents who are determined to capture the alien for themselves. At first glance it seems all very Watergate, echoing Seventies conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View. But it turns out that their leader, “Keys”, is actually a thoroughly decent fellow, a grown-up version of young Elliott himself. Official America, in other words, isn’t so bad after all. “I’ve been wishing for this,” Keys says at one point, “since I was 10 years old.” It’s hard to imagine a US government agent in 2022 being given a line like that.

Both films also share a fundamental faith in modernity itself: in science, technology and the idea of the future. In Star Wars, it’s true that the ships and uniforms are battered and grubby, reflecting a sense of decline since the Empire replaced the Republic — a very Roman theme. But none of the characters ever doubts that technology is good for them. There are no environmental costs; you can fire up your speeder as often as you like without worrying about climate change. Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence, except for the barman at the Mos Eisley cantina (“We don’t serve their kind here”). Like E.T.’s alien plant-enthusiast, droids are useful, good-natured, even kind-hearted. They’re not trying to take over the world. They’re just trying to help.

If you want an insight into the mentality behind films like E.T., perhaps the best place to go is the Nasa visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, a vast monument to the optimism of a vanished age. The entire experience is infused with a sense of faith: in America, in technology, in progress, in humanity itself. On the screens above you, a succession of elderly men and women with reassuring Midwestern accents talk of comradeship and teamwork, duty and commitment. None of them questions whether it was worth it, or doubts that they were doing the right thing. And the entire experience is underpinned by a sense of narrative, a story driving towards a moment of apotheosis. That moment, of course, is 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. “The first thing I think about when I think about the Sixties,’” Spielberg told Rolling Stone, “is when we landed on the moon.”

Suggested reading

Alien life is out there

By Sean Thomas

But my overwhelming impression after visiting Nasa a few months ago, rather like my feeling after rewatching E.T., was simply one of nostalgia. Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was more than a half a century ago; for children today, it is as remote as the Battle of the Somme was to children in 1969. To put it bluntly, the moment has passed. The Space Race is over. Nasa’s government funding has dried up; it relies heavily on private sponsorship now. When we think of technology today, we often think of the costs, not the benefits. Despite the miracle of the Covid vaccines, a believer in scientific progress today runs a gauntlet of cynicism and disillusionment. And who now believes in the future?

So if there was a film in the summer of 1982 that foreshadowed our present, it wasn’t E.T.. It was a competitor released just two weeks later, which performed very poorly at the box-office but became one of the most aesthetically influential science-fiction visions ever made. With its neon cities shrouded in smog and pollution, its streets crowded with rogues, immigrants, whores and replicants, its nightmarish future of driving rain and endless night, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner could hardly feel more different from the moral universe of Spielberg’s fairy-tale. But today our world seems closer to Scott’s vision than to Spielberg’s. And perhaps that’s why E.T. still commands such power, as a reminder of what we’ve lost.

All of which, of course, brings us back to that marzipan. As Jim Robson’s daughter Mary told the BBC, they would get it out now and again in the intervening years, to remind them of days gone by. “It was nice to see it again, it’s like a familiar face, so finding it wasn’t sad because it just always made us laugh,” she said wistfully. “I took it home to look after and I haven’t put it away. I like to see it every day.”

A bittersweet story, then. But perhaps the last word should go to St Albans’s equivalent of the engineers behind the Apollo missions, the director of Simmons Bakers. He was pleased to hear that their creation had lasted forty years, he said. “But I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.”

But their non-historicity being the case, what’s the point of writing about them?

If history teaches us anything it’s that we should expect the unexpected. But history, unlike the news, is something that’s already happened. Historians, unlike journalists, see events in the rearview mirror. As a result, they’re rather prone to deterministic explanations. For instance, there’s the Whig view of history with its narratives of ever-increasing freedom. Marxists, meanwhile, situate historical events within an overarching process of class struggle. Indeed, from millenarians to environmentalists to the friends and foes of the Anglosphere, everyone’s trying to bend the arc of history.

Further reading

The myth of ‘Anglo-America’

By Peter Franklin

They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. That’s not just because of the dodgy interpretations they put on historical events, but also the significance they attach to them. Even if a particular development is accurately interpreted, it doesn’t lend much credence to your favoured narrative if it could have easily gone another way. 

Just because we can be certain that something did happen it doesn’t mean that it had to happen. And that’s why alt history is so valuable. If we accept that the past could have followed a different path, then perhaps we won’t be quite so blasé about the future.

The historian E.H. Carr was was not a fan of alt history:

“…one can always play a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history.”

Of course, being a Marxist, he would say that, wouldn’t he? An ideologically-trammelled thought process is pre-determined by where it starts from. The same, however, cannot be said for what happens outside our heads. That’s why Carr’s contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, believed that one can’t fully understand a period of history without considering all the other ways it might have turned out.

For instance, why didn’t the Roman Empire conquer the German lands beyond the Rhine? A determinist might reach for some geographical explanation — the territory was inhospitable and the locals scary. And yet similar obstacles didn’t stop the the Romans from assimilating Britannia, so why not Germania too?

Well, because three Roman legions were wiped out at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, that’s why — and there was nothing pre-determined about that catastrophe. It required the mother of all ambushes, made possible by the extreme cunning of the German chieftain Arminius and the extreme gullibility of the Roman commander Varus. It could easily not have happened – and thus, untraumatised by such an unexpected and total defeat, the Romans might have extended the northern frontier to the Elbe or beyond.

What would a Romanised Germania have meant for the rest of history? It’s impossible to say, but we can imagine an unRomanised Gaul. The existence of France (and the French language) as we know it today depends on the fact that, two thousand years ago, the Romans conquered Gaul, but not Germania. Had things gone differently, French (and therefore British and therefore American) history would have developed along a very different path.

Further reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

What this example also tells us is just how much of history depends on the character, abilities and decisions of particular individuals (contrast the ruthless brilliance of Julius Caesar in the case of Gaul with the trusting foolishness of Varus in the case of Germania). There’s something called the great man theory of history. It’s was a 19th Century idea and deeply unfashionable today, but while the individuals who change the course of history aren’t necessarily ‘great’ or, indeed, men — there’s no doubting their existence.

They don’t have to be heroes or villains. In fact, they don’t have to have much authority of any kind. Their impact doesn’t even have to be the result of a deliberate decision. They just have to do the right (wrong) thing in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. For instance, someone, somewhere, did something that introduced the Covid-19 virus to the human population. Whether that was eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory we’ll probably never know; but whatever it was, it made all the difference. 

That’s why we can’t leave alt history to the historians alone. While some of them might see merit in exploring counterfactuals, their commitment to academic rigour acts as a constraint upon their speculations. Quite right too, but there’s also a case for letting our imaginations run riot — and for that we need story-tellers.

*

The Plot Against America, is a critically acclaimed TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. The point of divergence from our actual history comes when the isolationist Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940. It’s a warning that no country is immune to tyranny. 

The rise to power of a populist celebrity has obvious contemporary resonances. Too obvious, perhaps. In drawing parallels we shouldn’t overlook differences. I also have my doubts about alt history as wish-fulfilment. Curtis Sittenfeld had a best-seller this year with her novel Rodham — which re-imagines Hillary Clinton’s life and career if she had never married Bill. Amazingly, it turns out that she does better (in politics) without him — which, for a politician so inept in real life that she lost an election to Donald Trump, is stretching credulity.

Another example of alt history as political therapy is Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). The novel’s setting is 1980s London. But in this version of history, Alan Turing has survived the homophobic persecution of 1950s and, as a result, the progress of technology has been greatly accelerated – with dramatic consequences. For instance, the Argentinians have AI-enhanced Exocet missiles and therefore win the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher is thus defeated at the next election — by, er, Tony Benn. (Imagine an alt history in which a left-wing writer manages to portray our first female Prime Minister without humiliating her.)

Further reading

Are humans heading for the knacker’s yard?

By Peter Franklin

McEwen also supposes that Turing would have created an artificial, but conscious, mind — and, furthermore, one housed within an artificial, but lifelike, human body. It’s true that Turing and his colleagues really did think that artificial intelligence was within reach; but, genius though he was, he turned out to be colossally wrong about that. A more insightful novel might have explored how — or if — he would have realised his error.

For an ‘alt technology’ novel that does convince, I’d recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). This one’s set in a late 20th century England where medical science has taken a different and disturbing turn. Individuals are cloned and their ‘offspring’ — in effect, their twin siblings — raised in secluded institutions. Eventually, in young adulthood, the clones make a series of compulsory ‘donations’ — the basis of medical treatment for their ‘models’. Just how science and society developed in this direction, we’re never really told. Ishiguro keeps most of the details from us — and what he does reveal comes slowly. In this way, the readers’ experience parallels that of the clones, whose story this is.

In its mannered intimacy, Ishiguro’s prose creates a world as confined and claustrophobic as that imposed upon the protagonists, but without ever hiding the entire universe contained within each and every human being. And thus we’re lead gently by the hand to the story’s devastating conclusion.

Ishiguro’s minimalist approach is one way to do alt history — the other is to go all out and show us events unfolding on an epic scale. Instead of describing one small corner of the altered world, we get the panoramic view. Indeed, we might see the consequences of a point of divergence playing out over decades or even centuries. I’ve previously written about Pavane by Keith Roberts in which the Catholic Church defeats the Reformation and goes on to deliberately slow down the pace of technological change — with justification, perhaps.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is set in a world in which the Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide America between them. But more than that, the author shows us parallel realities. There is, for instance, a story within the story — a banned book in which the Allies won the war — except not as they did in our timeline.

Further reading

Why we must suppress technological progress

By Peter Franklin

Then there’s the master of the maximalist approach — Harry Turtledove. In his novel How Few Remain (1997) a missing message from General Lee is recovered by the Confederacy (instead of falling into Union hands, as it did in reality). From that small change, the author develops — in lavish detail — a timeline that extends into the 1940s. It’s not just that the South wins the Civil War, but that the two sides (the Confederate States and the rump United States) go on to fight the First and Second World Wars on America soil. By the end of eleventh novel in the series, the North nukes the South and America is finally reunified, sort of.  

*

Fully fictional alt history can therefore go where scholarly investigation can’t. While there’s merit in examining the immediate consequences of a counterfactual, there’s only so far a serious historian can take the speculation. Once you get into second or third order effects, the mounting uncertainties overwhelm academic credibility. The novelist, though, can keep going — perhaps into the far future. 

This allows us to ask an important question, which is whether the underlying forces of history would eventually reassert themselves. Even if certain details were changed, with short-term consequences, would the world end up in much the same place over the longer-term? For the historical determinist the answer is yes. If ‘great men’ like Julius Caesar or Martin Luther had died in infancy, there’d have been other Caesars, other Luthers. As for wars, some of them could have gone the other way, but for how long would that truly matter? Consider the Wars of the Roses, for instance. How many of us today know — or care — which side won?

Further reading

Who do the English think they are?

By Razib Khan

But at this point we need to let science intrude upon the humanities. Chaos theory, for instance, teaches us that tiny differences in starting conditions can create hugely different outcomes. It’s a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect — so-called because, conceivably, the flap of butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could lead to a hurricane on the other. If that seems far fetched, then think about the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs. With the slightest change to its starting trajectory, it would have missed Earth and human history wouldn’t have happened at all. 

The determinists, therefore, have missed something rather big. While the passage of time may erase some events, others are magnified.

A Sound of Thunder is a short story by Ray Bradbury. It’s a sci-fi scenario in which big game hunters travel back in time to shoot dinosaurs. The trip organisers are very careful about not altering the past. For instance, the only animals that get shot are ones that were about to die anyway. Furthermore, the time travellers are told to stick to a special raised platform, so that  they don’t even leave footprints behind. But then on one trip, a hunter panics — he steps off the platform and crushes an insect. When he gets back home, he finds that his carelessness has changed the course history — and not for the better. A fascistic presidential candidate who was all set to lose the election is now the winner. Oops.

That crushed insect, by the way, was a butterfly. 

*

This then is what I think alt history teaches us about real history: not that it is without pattern or meaning, but that it is fragile.

The things that we may regard as progress or count as our achievements, hang by a thread — a sequence of events, anyone of which could have turned out differently.

That’s worth bearing in mind as we congratulate ourselves on our comforts and liberties. That they were gained at all was not inevitable — and nor is their survival.

Whether or not one sees the hand of providence at work in human history, we should never take what we’ve got for granted.

Further reading

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

In another sense, though, they do. Banks died in 2013 – tragically young, at just 59. But he lived to see a technological world that was wildly different from that of the mid-1980s, when the Culture was first set down on paper (and wildly different from that of the 1960s, when he first had the idea). Most sci-fi, a few decades after it’s released, starts to look distinctly ropy. The 1983 vision of a super-hi-tech computer with green text on a screen and a blinking cursor would have been laughably dated by 2005. Watch any old Star Trek episode and you’ll see.

But Banks’s science fiction – even his earliest – rarely falls into this trap. Read the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, back to back with the most recent, and you’ll notice how little the technology has changed. In Phlebas, Banks is a bit more willing to use the word “computer” – it probably seemed quite futuristic, back in 1987 – but even in The Player of Games (published the following year), the word seems passé. An intelligent drone wails that the primitive aliens they’re visiting are “calling me a computer!” (The AI and drones are always characters in Banks’s fiction, never objects or tools.)

More from this author

Why we should fear technophobia

By Tom Chivers

In some specific ways, too, Banks foresaw the changes that technology would bring. In Player, Banks says in an aside that when Culture citizens tell stories “in which Things Went Wrong” (the standard opening), “the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another”, was humans “losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal”.

A terminal – usually a ring, button, pen or similar small jewellery-like item – is a person’s link to the super-powerful AI “Mind” that runs each artificial Culture world (and to everybody else in the Culture.) It’s a communication tool, an information source, a personal organiser; it can form a screen when required and answer any question. It’s always passively listening and a shout or a word can activate it. The titular character in Player uses his to take photographs. Imagine getting used to having all that to hand! No wonder it’s Culture citizens’ worst nightmare to lose it.

Suggested reading

How the smartphone economy ate itself

By Peter Franklin

Player was published in 1988, when mobile phones were brick-sized things employed solely by awful City traders in those stupid blue shirts with white collars. But by the early 2000s, when my Nokia phone started to gain a few extra functionalities – a colour screen and the capacity to play music; then a camera; and at last a link, of sorts, to the internet – I remember having a conversation with a friend. “They’re becoming terminals,” I said. “They’re becoming the one thing you use for everything.” I used the Banks term because it seemed so clearly to be the Banks concept.

The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007, and smartphones didn’t become widespread until a few years later. But to a Banks fan like me they very obviously fit the framework of the terminal: small, jewel-beautiful objects that could be your communicator, your computer, your link to a global datasphere containing the majority of human knowledge. They could play videos or music, be a book or magazine.

As Siri and Alexa came into being a few years later, the parallels became ever more stark. I could say “Hey Siri” right now and, in my pocket, my phone would do whatever I wanted it to. (Or, more likely, because it’s in my pocket and my voice would be muffled and anyway they’re not quite perfect yet, it would phone my mum and I’d have to scramble to switch it off. But it’s getting there.)

The only functional difference between a smartphone and a terminal is that the latter links you to a godlike Mind that controls the entire world as though it were a theme park. And that, of course, is only because there is no such Mind in our world.

More from this author

Do we really have a 'suicidal generation'?

By Tom Chivers

We may build one though, in the not too distant future. Most AI researchers think that a superintelligent machine will be built in the lifetimes of children alive today. And Banks, unlike many science fiction writers, understood just how transformative that will be. The humans in the Culture have rich lives, full of adventure and sex and drugs, but they are bit-players. The civilisation is run by the Minds, because they are vastly more intelligent than the citizens.

Citizens’ lives are protected by the Minds, while the economy is entirely run by them; most humans just live lives of uninterrupted leisure. Whether that’s a utopia or a dystopia is a question of perspective.

The superintelligent machines will not, Banks saw, be like computers that we use. If they come to exist, they will be sovereign. We need to ensure that they, like the Minds, are on our side. After all, they’re quite likely to connect to us all via the possession most of us have to hand at this very moment: our terminals – I mean – smartphones.

There’s an obscurity that especially bedevils futuristic novels. Of all those millions of books that have been published, so many of that ilk, in particular, sink into the oblivion of the copyright libraries.

Occasionally, though, a few will bubble back up to the surface to surprise you. And a book you have never heard of before, will suddenly be on the lips of various and unexpected people. This was the case for me, with Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Lord of the World, which was first mentioned by a friend in Silicon Valley, and then recommended by the Pope – though not personally in the latter case.

It was on a flight from the Philippines, in January 2015, that Pope Francis mentioned the novel to a group of journalists, with the words “I advise you to read it“. The novel was duly reissued, and Robert Hugh Benson’s works saved from obscurity.

If ‘Benson’, as the surname of an author, means anything to anyone today then it is most likely because of Robert Hugh’s brother, EF Benson. His Mapp and Lucia novels still have admirers, and have twice been adapted for television, first in the 1980s with Nigel Hawthorne, and then more recently, in 2014, by the BBC.

Further reading

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

The Bensons were a remarkable family, as a biography of the family published three years ago (A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill) made clear. The father – Edward White Benson – rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury but all six of his children were queer in several definitions of the word. As, apparently was their mother.

Between them they produced scores of books, including novels and memoirs. AC Benson edited Queen Victoria’s letters and wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory by his friend Edward Elgar. But it was Robert Hugh who published his strange dystopia in 1907, three years after becoming ordained as a Catholic priest (to the horror of the family).

Lord of the World is a strange and unsettling work, set in the early 21st century, it depicts a world in which secular humanism has almost completely replaced religion. Like all futuristic novels some of the details no longer convince. For instance Esperanto never quite caught on so much as Benson seems to have anticipated it doing.

But the novel is full of other disturbingly prescient insights. These are both specific – he predicts, for example, a ‘European Parliament’ – and more general – universities have become moribund and closed, made irrelevant by their own areas of study. As one character puts it: “The object of secular education is presumably the production of something visible – either character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that the Universities produced either – which was worth having.”

Further reading

Is cultural Marxism a myth?

By Douglas Murray

The idea that most houses of worship have been converted to secular uses didn’t require much foresight – Benson could have looked back to the French Revolution to discover that inevitability. But it is his description of the details of the outlook of people in the secular humanist world that he gets strikingly – if exaggeratedly – right.

Euthanasia has become an entirely normal facet of life. When there is a Volor accident – a Volor is a type of aircraft in which everyone travels – squads of government euthanasia specialists move in to deal with the injured. The mother of one of the leading secularists in the novel makes a late life return to Catholicism, which her son clearly disapproves of. As she nears her end, she is euthanised at the command of her daughter-in-law, while her husband is away. She is clutching a rosary as she is killed.

Throughout the novel, Benson manages to capture the difference in outlook between those few remaining believers – centred in Rome – and the secularised world which rules. Yet the book is not pure invective against that world, any more than the picture of the church and its clergy is remotely hagiographic. The subtle differences in life and world outlook that manifest in the absence of religion are persuasively depicted.

Further reading

Why Titania is perfect for our times

By Douglas Murray

Time and again throughout the book, Benson seems uncannily attuned to some kind of deep, eternal truths which mean that when he predicts a thing, he predicts it accurately along with its consequences. So just as he foresees the world’s leaders travelling around by Volor from one summit to another, he also anticipates the evil ends to which this sort of advance will be put. The idea of aerial bombing, and specifically the wiping out of whole cities, occurs to Benson more than three decades before it occurs to – and was put into practice by – the leaders of Europe.

And in the novel’s central figure there is something so strikingly prophetic, that it is understandable why the work retained a few faithful – not to say cult – followers. Julian Felsenburgh is a mysterious figure who rises to startling prominence. He captivates all those who cross his path and many who have not but who are fascinated with the stories of his origin and reputation.

Felsenburgh is said to have a tremendous charisma, able to command and to speak softly. He rises to become the leader of Europe because he promises to bring peace. Of course, the promise comes only if the public are willing to blindly submit to him, but vast proportions of them are willing to do precisely that and so the hell into which Felsenburgh is able to catapult the world comes not in spite of the people, but with their enthusiastic participation.

In many ways Lord of the World is a typical depiction of the anti-Christ story from Biblical apocalypse texts. Felsenburgh comes in order to stand against the mother church and bring about the end times. But if that were all that Benson had written, the novel would not have had much enduring appeal.

Further reading

Ten precedents for a compromise Brexit

By Peter Franklin

Its resonance lies, instead, in the fact that Benson identified deep undercurrents in religion and secularism that we feel tugging at us now: the want of meaning, the vulnerability to almost any new idea or leader. Benson understands that the character of mankind will never change. Specifically, he sees that man’s desire to worship and believe does not change. What happens is that man merely transfers his allegiances from one set of orthodoxies and hierarchies with which he has become disenchanted, in order to prostrate himself (imagining this to be freedom) before almost any other. And, as Benson suggests, a world wholly without religion may also be a world wholly without defences.