The Future Freaks Me Out

Today I went into work to finish putting together progress reports. After finally filing copies in triplicate and getting a third meal of out the leftovers from pizza Friday (the PTO buys teachers pizza once a month), I headed home to kick back for a bit and finish Dune.

In Defense of Sci-Fi

Dune was great.

I absolutely believe that Science Fiction is the last custodian of prophesy, speculative fiction, and the "fairy story" model, as practiced by J.R.R. Tolkien and George MacDonald. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, packs into one book the most complete understanding of Western civilization that I have seen since Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. He combines a deeply Roman sense of politics, depicted in the Bene Gesserit (Latin for "he/she manages it well"), a secret society of women who are shapers of history and custodians of the art of politics, with a feudal Galactic Empire reminiscent of the Carolingians, and a superb understanding of Old Testament prophecy and Jewish mysticism depicted in his desert-dwelling Fremen. A large portion of their prophesy is in the form of direct quotation from the book of Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Pentateuch.

Dune also introduces the most complex and complete picture of an alien society that I have ever seen, and in doing so shows us what a future looks like when politics, commerce, religion, and poetry are only practiced by small and exclusive groups.

Science Fiction, as a genre, fills a vacuum left by several now extinct genres. It fills the void of Utopia Fiction, showing us how a paradise, such as that in Huxley's A Brave New World or Thomas More's Utopia, is not always what it seems. Terry Pratchet and Piers Anthony take up where Sterne and Juvenal left off with the genre of satire. Allegory, too, now seems to be the sole possession of Science Fiction.

Most importantly though, while we may not have flying cars yet, or be in imminent danger of succumbing to the rule of Big Brother, we need books like 1984 and shows like Heroes to tell us what might be coming, so that we have time to prepare, both physically and morally.

On September 10th the powers that be flipped the switch of the Large Hadron Collider. In recent years we've actually seen a lot of fruit from the world of "mad science," that is, science without any specific purpose or direction. While knowledge is obviously a good thing and we should absolutely be probing the depths of the natural world at all times, we should do so with deliberate care. Science Fiction, again, gives us a window into the future to see what the result of such labors might and will be, and, as raw science frequently forgets to do, ties these developments directly to humanity, and its detriment or advancement.

Without the permission of the author, here is a great example of amateur Sci-Fi/speculative science at work:

Through a very powerful telescope, like Hubble, we see images of stars, solar systems, and galaxies as if they are young, fresh, and in the process of creation.

But that is not so. We are merely seeing the images that have taken millions of years to get here. By now, these stars may be dead, the solar systems swallowed up into red giants, and the galaxies vanished into the black holes they are surrounded by. Humanity will never see this though, as our solar system and galaxy may indeed swallow itself up before the images of the slow deaths of these distant objects make their way to distant Earth.

In that same sense, if we could get beyond our own solar system's curb of light emmittance, by device or reflection, we could witness the birth of this planet. We could see first hand the creation of the oceans, of the continents separating, and with enough magnification, we could see the dinosaurs, watch the D-Day in real time, watch the Kennedy Assassination, watch our own births. We could see the face of Jesus.

From the right spot and with the right tools every moment of history is still accessible to us. Waves are everywhere, always just waiting to be intercepted. As we send our media, transformed into frequencies, into space, directed at satellites, a large amount of the information bypasses the satellite and just floats out into space. Somewhere, intelligent life in the next solar system might be watching the world premiere of Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time," or just getting the news that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

Science is beautiful and frightening, and just as it was the duty of learned men in simpler times to study the stars for their meaning, to practice their Latin grammar and learn the lessons of Virgil by heart, to learn the art and the beauty of rhetoric, it is our duty to look to the future and prepare for what lies ahead.

Science Fiction keeps this spirit of philosophical and moral speculation alive, because, sooner than we imagine, the questions these books ask will actually be set before us. Will we be ready to answer?

Oh, and don't watch all of this, but here's a clip of what the SNL cast of '79 thought Jeopardy would look like in 1999:



Also, keep in mind that we're only a week or two away from all the big fall premiers and I need someone to host a viewing of the Heroes season opener. You provide the the TV, I'll bring the Man Nachos.