Warren Ellis schreibt:
Welcome to the future. It’s the world you’re living in.
People are disappointed with the future they’re living in. Since 2001, the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: “This is the future. Where’s my flying car? Where’s my fucking jet pack?�? Pre-millennium, we were living in an unprecedented density of imagined futures, and we assumed it was all waiting for us around the corner. And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here.
All that means, of course, is that 98% of our predictions have failed us. Which shouldn’t have come as much surprise. We treat science fiction as predictive fiction, which it isn’t and should never have been. William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER loses none of its fictive power for failing, as Gibson himself recently said, to predict mobile phones. Mobile telephony has proved a technology of massive change – not least of which has been in the field of fiction itself. Possession of a tri-band handset makes about a hundred years’ worth of thriller plotting irrelevant. My own GLOBAL FREQUENCY graphic novel has fallen foul of the future. It’s currently being adapted for American television, and we’ve run into an unexpected problem. When I developed the mobile phones that the members of the Global Frequency extreme rescue service carry, I was working at the hard edge of available technology – two years ago. Today, a Treo 600 smartphone from Palmspring does pretty much everything the GF Phone does. So I’m having to consult with a futurist at Nokia to ensure the TV version of the phone does more than something you can pick up at the supermarket.
It’s not the future we expected, being able to shoot video with a telephone and wirelessly beam it into someone’s hand on the other side of the world. I don’t know that anyone predicted that people could be driven to orgasm by images of a girl’s spinning eyes. Evan Bataille would have looked twice at the Ass Milkshake. Somewhere, there’s a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, and a rat that produces monkey sperm. Mars is being explored by two motorised skateboards. Wernher Von Braun, who designed a Mars expedition for a crew of two hundred using available technology in the 1950s, would have shat blood in anger. Space, in his conception, was a heaven to be reached with power and glory. He would have sneered at the rocket sticks the rovers were launched on – where were his mighty chariots, to shake the ground in their passing? – and blanched to discover that his great machines and two hundred heroes had been dropped to make way for a couple of glorified rollerskates. He would have concluded that something evil had happened, and that this was not his future.
No nuclear space arks, no jetpacks. Robot skateboards and butterflies that glow green.
We all forgot that the future is yet to be written. No-one knows how it’s going to turn out. The best we can do is track the future as it happens, and use our fiction as a tool with which to understand where we are.
By the time you read this, everything in it will be history.
The future’s a moving target.
19. Februar 2005 21:32 Uhr. Kategorie Stuff. Keine Antwort.
