Topic: Must Read
Science fiction is open to criticism on a number of grounds, but failure to predict the future isn’t one of them. Few writers of SF see themselves as being in the business of prediction. They would describe themselves, rather, as speculative thinkers. “What if…?” is the genre’s iconic question, a question often applied to the future. So you can find many stories, published in the 1950s and 1960s, that tell of colonies on Mars, or asteroid mining, or androids, or world government by twenty-first century.
Sometimes, of course, SF does get the future right. Several years prior to the First World War, H.G. Wells wrote “The Land Ironclads,” a short story that forecast with startling accuracy the development of the tank and its impact on the battlefields of the coming conflict. Wells foresaw how technology in the form of mobile armored firepower could revolutionize the art of war. That he did not project his speculations a couple of decades further into the future, to describe how the tank, the airplane and the radio would combine to produce the style of mechanized warfare commonly termed “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) is no valid criticism of his achievement in “The Land Ironclads.”
But Wells was more often wrong than right about the future, particularly in the area of social and political development. Like many forward-thinking intellectuals of his time (and of later times), he confidently predicted the consolidation of humanity into a single political and social entity—a World State. Atavistic nationalism would gradually wither away, to be replaced by a cosmopolitan human civilization, free from the burdens of national rivalries and wars. No doubt Wells and others were influenced in this direction by the doctrines of socialism, which reviled nationalism and patriotism as forms of false consciousness, imposed on the minds of men and women by an unnatural economic system. Only when this system had been thrown off, to be replaced by a world-wide socialist commonwealth, would humanity reach its full potential.
Perhaps thanks to Wells, whose work fashioned the template for so many later writers, the vision of a world-wide (or system-wide or Galaxy-wide) human commonwealth became one of the most fundamental underlying themes of science fiction. In countless novels and stories, the action takes place against just such a background. The World State is not merely predicted—it’s presented as a foregone conclusion. And this seems to me to be one of the genre’s greatest imaginative failures.
Looking at the world as it is today, those confident predictions of the coming world state seem juvenile indeed. Ideologies that focus on the unity of humanity do exist—but in one way or another they are anti-human, preaching the need for repression, ignorance and poverty. Islam is only the most glaring example of this trend. It also manifests itself in progressive circles, e.g. in the environmental movement, where humanity is reviled as the enemy of the planet.
SF is a broad literary field, of course, and there are many examples of the opposing view. Perhaps only those writers and readers who refuse to grow up still cling to the view that the unity of the species would be a good thing. The history of the last century surely suggests that the converse is the case.
