Positive futures

eoforyth linked to Project Hieroglyph: Fighting society's dystopian future, which you should read before going any further to see just why I disagree with it.

Of course it does contain gems such as this:

"Why do we end up with the technologies we do? Why are people working on, for example, invisibility cloaks? Well, it's Harry Potter, right? That's where they saw it," he says.

He being Braden Allenby, a professor of engineering, ethics and law who has apparently never encountered Norse mythology, the Arabian Nights, or any of the other numerous pre-Rowling occurrences of the concept in our culture.

Like all conscious attempts to remould popular culture nearer to the heart's desire, I think this is probably doomed either to fizzle out or to produce a bunch of uninspired attempts to jolly us along, kind of like the Gang Show in space. Of course I am very much in favour of more positive, less bleak views of the future, and I write one myself, but a broader cultural view might have told Mr Allenby that you can't make it happen, short of totalitarian expedients. Good grief, did anyone actually watch The Happiness Patrol? :)

At the root of this endeavour is the same tragic misconception I talked about in my last post here, that science fiction is or should be somehow more than any other genre of fiction that people read for stimulation and entertainment; that it's somehow part of science, furthering progress, creating change, building the future, and therefore it's got to build it right or we won't get there. And as I said then, I'm no stranger to that comforting feeling of self-importance, that fortifying certainty that if I could just get everyone in the world reading science fiction they would all See The Truth and the world would be a paradise withal. Sf fans are just as vulnerable as anyone else to the temptation to see themselves as a chosen people, saviours of the world. And then you close the book and look at reality, and you realise it ain't going to happen.

Some good things have happened that can be traced back to sf (well, usually to Star Trek, which sf fans didn't acknowledge as real sf for years after its cancellation, but which of course is now an honoured member of our little family and always has been, yes indeedy) but most of the technological things people trumpet about are cosmetic coincidences imposed on things that were always going to happen in some form. Maybe it's true that the inclusion of Lt. Uhura furthered social change; if so, that's great, but that problem is still with us and shows no sign of being solved, and there were other areas in which the show remained strictly retrograde.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Project Hieroglyph will make a positive difference and prove me once again the idiot. If it produces works that help us to gain control of the political and economic forces that are currently sweeping us towards the cliff, if it inspires the implementation of technologies that have already been developed which can halt or reverse environmental damage, if it helps to destroy the deliberately engineered corporate consumerism that keeps squandering resources by making things nobody can afford and then throwing them away...then maybe it can help to bring about beneficial change and save us from the very real dystopia into which we seem, right now, to be heading at full speed.

And at least it'll give people something cheerful to read. That's no bad thing.