"I'm not sure I completely like the new world": Extract from forthcoming book The Music of the Future at Repeater Blog

An extract from my forthcoming Repeater book, The Music of the Future has been published at the Repeater Books blog.

"During one of our frequent impasses, we discussed the possibility of the Soviet Union collapsing and the West sending in robot tanks and androids to save what could be saved. . . After a day or two we retreated from the idea. But let us suppose we had thought events through, and had been able exactly to replicate the true events of 1989, only seven years in the future. . . And if we had put all this on the screen in 1982? No one would have believed it. Even SF is the art of the plausible."

- Brian Aldiss, 'Foreword: Attempting to Please,' on collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on Supertoys Last All Summer Long / AI

If it is true that, today, 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as the first chapter title in Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism would have it, it may be propitious to recall that, less than a decade before it did in fact end, much the same might have been said of communism.

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, science fiction was willing to imagine all manner of extraordinary futures. Rare though was the author willing to forecast the fall of the iron curtain without some extraordinary catastrophe or intergalactic intervention to effectuate it. Rare, but not quite nonexistent.

In his 1953 novel, Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a world society forcibly brought about by the instruction of peaceable alien invaders. Nine years later, in a work of non-fiction, Profiles of the Future, he implies that 'voices from the sky' of rather more terrestrial origin might be capable of bringing about the same result. In a chapter in which Clarke speculates about the possibilities of satellite broadcasting, he compares a still "parochial" radio network to a global television future in which "the great highway of the ether will be thrown open to the whole world,

and all men will become neighbours - whether they like it or not. Any form of censorship, political or otherwise, would be impossible; to jam signals coming down from the heavens is almost as difficult as blocking the light of the stars. The Russians could do nothing to stop their people seeing the American way of life. . . "

Now, I'm far from qualified to speculate about the possible role of satellite broadcasting in the collapse of the Soviet Union (and obviously the idea that every form of censorship is rendered impossible by it - or any particularly accurate picture of American life transmitted by it - must now seem absurd). But from a purely chronological perspective, the rise of one did seem to happen at about the same time as the fall of the other. . .

"Celebrities are Certain to be Accredited Miracles" : Remembering the Future

It should be a cautionary experience for today's would-be-futurists to read those projections now a few decades old. Recently I have been reading a curious addition to this canon, named Futureprobe and written by Nigel Collins and Arthur Cotterell, a community worker and a lecturer in charge of adult education respectively, first published in 1974 by Heineman Educational Books (a "Teacher's Book," we are told, accompanies this volume, but alas Oxfam didn't have it). So much of Futureprobe is written in the language of inevitability - x or y, or at the very least some development in x or y, are always bound to happen.

To the credit of Messers Collins and Cotterell, they do at least frequently offer two or three opposing scenarios - one a "nightmare", the other a more optimistic "daylight scenario" (and occasionally "twilight" between them). More than can be said for many of today's futurists, especially those concerned with developments to do with the internet. Most of whom are so in thrall to Thatcher's TINA doctrine that any possible future outcome, aside from that featured in the latest Google press release, is literally inconceivable.

Despite, refusing to speculate beyond the distant horizon of 2000AD, however, it is notable how few of the predictions, or even anything like them, whether nightmare or bright daylight, have come true. Indeed, in the case of most of the salient points under discussion, things have remained rather static (though this is obviously not for a moment to suggest that nothing in the world has changed since 1974 - though, as Brian Aldiss has remarked, the idea, for instance, that the Soviet Union might collapse before the century's end would have been considered too far-fetched even for science fiction only a decade before it actually happened).

What is interesting, in the light of the thesis put forward in Hervé Juvin's The Coming of the Body, is that, for the authors of Futureprobe, such still-distant promises as Martian colonies and manned space flight beyond the solar system, a leisure society made possible by a robotic workforce, the end of pollution thanks to solar-powered cities and the death of the petrol-powered automobile; are evidently considered to be of an equal level of plausibility as a number of developments with which we are all now familiar, at least from the news if not from our own lives - the transplantation of any organ but the brain; the xenografting of tissue from other animals in surgical procedures; euthanasia centres; and the cloning of mammalian life forms. It may well be that in 1974 all these things really were equally possible, equally near and equally far, but that the mechanisms of politics and scientific research have seemingly progressed only with regard to the body.