From great illusion to hopeless disaster: how science fiction imagined the future yesterday and how it does it today

In 1963, Philip K. Dick invented, for the radioactive ludic future of his curious The Titan Players, a type of sympathetic car. It is one of Philip K. Dick's lesser-known galactic-paranoid satires, in which reality unfolds. It has a seemingly fascinating version – here the thing has to do with strange intergalactic card games – that hides a horrifying truth. In the case of The Titan Players, what is really happening is that there are hardly any human beings left no matter how much they think they are still everywhere. Titan's creatures are impersonating them. The virtuality of everything Philip K. Dick wrote, the unreliability of reality, described not only its main characteristic – since childhood he suffered from paranoia – but also the soul of a world divided in two, the world divided in two of the time, which imposed on each of its parts a very different reality. Aha, the Cold War. That his literature is considered visionary today has to do with the way in which that world is mirrored in the polarized and unstable contemporary present. Apparent micro-realities, fake news, the command in the hands of an entity not necessarily political, not even of this world: the Martian anticipating the algorithm. And how does the comprehensive car fit into all that?

Every dystopia, every speculative science fiction, is projected into the future to rehearse, in an environment in which everything is controllable by the author, what does not work, or terrifies, in the present. Thus, as Margaret Atwood always says: the future is nothing more than another world in which everything is possible and in which it is not reality that rules, but you, the one who writes.

The change that has occurred since the time when technology was seen as something that could, if not save us, but make our lives more comfortable, has to do with what was happening in the world at the time in which the work in question was being conceived. Thus, while Dick doubted what he saw because, ideologically, society was an overlap of layers, he could not help but anticipate that machines were going to free us of some kind of weight and, at the same time, suffer with us. The car that brings Mr. Garden home on the first page of Titan Players not only flies — here's something science fiction has stopped talking about in recent times: flying cars — it understands him. He understands that he has drunk more than necessary and, since he wants him to get home safely, he lends himself to driving for it. Of course, the car talks. He addresses him most politely.

A scene from the movie 'Fahrenheit 451', based on the dystopian fable published in 1953 by Ray Bradbury.Universal (Getty Images)

That in the so-called golden age of science fiction, which began in the forties and lasted until practically the swing of the seventies, what was written – nothing had yet dethroned the novel as a reflection of the world – had something of sense of wonder, that is, celebrated scientific achievements and the only thing I feared about them was their use, It said a lot about what was happening. Appliances were making things easier, and who wouldn't want to imagine how all that progress could make them even easier in the not-too-distant future? Of course, there were those who feared, like Ray Bradbury, that gadgets like television would devour our brains. His Fahrenheit 451 has both a bibliophile apocalypse and a premonition about what screens could end up replacing. There is a moment in the novel that plagiarized, or else honored, Back to the Future, the film by Robert Zemeckis that collected all the illusory topics of that well-intentioned perfect future: television speaks to the viewer, and it is not housed in the wall, it is the wall itself. Bradbury went further and imagined that television, and what you saw on it, replaced your life and your family, and was your own world. Wasn't it a virtual proto-life?

The writers of the time, starting with Isaac Asimov, the inventor of the robot, and of its ethics, its famous rules—the human being still believing that he could contain progress—had seen how Jules Verne had imagined things and those things had come true, and they wanted to do the same. Verne had imagined that man stepped on the moon, and hadn't humanity wished he could do it and set out to do so after reading it? Thus, Bradbury imagined that we arrived at Mars in Martian Chronicles, but the triumphalism of the feat, in his case, warned at the same time of the alienation of the New World —that which in the fifties was coming, turbocapitalism—, and of the tricky of that type of power —the power to invade a planet—, invoking the ghost of colonialism. At that time, it would be said, there was still a belief in politics, or in some sense of duty, in a command capable of the worst who could, however, choose to do good. Today that has completely changed. A philosophical parable like Ursula K's The Dispossessed. Le Guin would make no sense today, when the totalitarianism of the market has abolished not only the possibility of any ideology – or the choice of something else – but the very idea of management that escapes the logic of the strongest.

That the future is seen today from the genre as something withered, without hope and without, of course, anyone at the wheel – every idea of politics in contemporary dystopian fiction, from the novels of Cory Doctorow to the chapters of Black Mirror, in the hands of the algorithm, in the hands of the data – is only influencing what is wrong in the present. Which includes, and in the first place, the climate and the end of civilization as we know it. The value of a phenomenon like The Last of Us —which, let's not forget, was a video game before television, was interactive fiction, the one that best and before is taking charge of that not so distant future, or how to explain the success of The Horizon in describing a retrofuture at all far-fetched, since we saw it during the pandemic, During our absence from the world, in which cities are ruins upon which wildlife makes its way again—is precisely that. Expanding the effect of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and including the climate disaster anticipated in Kim Stanley Robinson's novels. Although it would seem that Robinson is still overly optimistic: he places the migrations to the north because of the unbearable life in the desert south of the Earth from 2140. That does in New York 2140. And he goes even further in 2312, the novel that earned him the Nebula Prize.

Image from the film 'Ready Player One', directed by Steven Spielberg in 2018, based on the homonymous novel published by Ernest Cline seven years earlier. COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL © Warner Bros (Contact) (- / ContactPhoto)

But it is unusual for contemporary speculative fiction to be so far removed in time. The future is so close today that sometimes it is not even future – in The Last of Us it is frightening present – and technology has ceased to be celebrated: it is presented as a kind of placebo, a weapon of mass distraction that avoids contemplating how everything collapses – as in Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline – and maintains the illusion of some kind of microorder to taste – the one that occurs in every bubble of opinion: The Circle, by Dave Eggers—.

There is guilt in the adult who knows that he is not leaving anything to the child who grows, or has already done so – and there he returns to the visionary of The Road or, above all, The Last of Us – and a sensation, very powerful and with the appearance of an abyss, of the end of the party. Hence, J. G. Ballard – who thought about everything, including climate change, in novels such as The Submerged World – is the writer who best represents both the present and the future imagined from the present. His literature is an ode to the very idea of the end of the party, marked as it was by, first, a house with countless servants – his father was a renowned diplomat; then, a concentration camp when Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and, later, the unexpected death of his wife – still young – during a vacation in Alicante, which left him in charge of their three children, then still just children. All the destruction contained in Ballard's literature explains, in some way, the present. We had too much, we were happy and there is nothing left. Philip K. Dick's sympathetic car is not going to offer to take you home, because there is nowhere you can feel safe and sound in that immediate future.

75% discount

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber