Why is my future so British?

[avevale_intelligencer]

I keep grappling with this question. The short, flip answer is the one Davy Jones gave Frank Zappa: "Well, so am I, what can I tell you?" A British future, rightly or wrongly, is the one I've imagined and dreamed about since my childhood. What the word "British" means has of course changed a great deal in that time, in some ways very much to the good, in rather more ways very much to the bad, and in even more ways not nearly enough.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that even if the million to one chance comes off and the human race has a future (this necessarily involving the spontaneous and immediate arrival of Clues in a number of minds as yet innocent of such things) Britain has pretty much had its chance and blown it. We have no manifest destiny. Other nations deserve and will get their turn on top, if there's any justice. "Britishness," such of it as remains, will sink none too gracefully under the mass of other cultures and never be heard from again, and nobody will mourn much.

So what is the point of my writing a future in which people speak English, and, what's more, largely my kind of English, in which houses and roads and systems of government are all based on the ones I've seen about me and people still quote from British movies, even six thousand years in the future? How could such an insane future come about? Am I not just being lazy?

Well, of course, I am lazy. Ask anyone. But from an authorial point of view, I write what I write because it's what I want to write. I think stories set in my future can still speak to people, even people who are (to their great relief) not me. I don't expect or hope for any great success; my readership on Avevale is, I'm fairly sure, in single figures, and I'm glad and thankful to get it. Were I someone like Kai Lung, unrolling my mat under the mulberry tree, it would be a respectable audience.

("But why does the noble Kai Lung no longer set out his begging bowl?" asked one of his hearers.

"Thus and thus," responded the storyteller. "It may be that, attracted by this one's uplifted voice, a traveller from the steppes of Tartary may one day drop a copper coin into the crude and ill-designed receptacle in question. Should that chance occur, according to the latest decrees of our illustrious and high-minded Emperor, this person must immediately encase his belongings in some sturdy wrapping and set forth upon the road that leads to those same steppes, there on his arrival to render up to the Grand Cham, or more probably to such persons as he may appoint for the task, that which they deem to be a due and just proportion of that copper coin by way of taxation, since the Imperial assessors now decline, with many graceful and self-effacing gestures, to collect it themselves. Since such a journey would cost many strings of cash, and moreover lead this person into realms in which his narration of imagined tales would find no ear capable of comprehending its utterances, it has seemed more prudent to avoid the contingency by removing the source of temptation."

But I digress.)

So, to slide from the Doyleian to the Watsonian mode (do they still make sidecars, I wonder?), how can I possibly justify a future in which the dominant culture is British?

Well.

I've mentioned in various afterpieces and blog posts how the world was saved from ecological destruction by the nanotech-enhanced people I've called "the gods of California," who rightly reasoned that a lesson that kills all the students is no lesson at all and sometimes you just have to sort out the mess. Somewhere around the same time came the discovery of the introction drive, which bypassed all that silly relativity business and could, given the right components, be constructed in any reasonably well-equipped workshop, and this discovery was leaked to the world. In no time (sociologically speaking) came the First Spacing, and more than half the population of the planet was off, mostly those people who had had a raw deal on Earth and desperately wanted a brighter future elsewhere. The population of the American continents was decimated several times over; also those of Africa, Asia and the less well-off parts of Europe.

Those who remained behind were those who for the moment were content to live, chafing a little, under the benevolent constraints imposed by the gods for the long-term healing of the planet. The Second Spacing happened long after the gods had gone off wherever they had gone, and the planet was more or less safe; those who left this time left in a spirit rather of hope than of desperation, of let's-see-what's-out-there-and-if-Granny-actually-made-it. That took care of the rest of Europe, pretty much.

And those who remained behind, nursing a bitter resentment against those people who had had the enterprise to go when they themselves hadn't...those whose culture had stagnated, because the ones who had left had been mostly young and progressive souls, leaving behind the ignorant, bigoted and conservative...those who continued as they always had, because they hadn't the sense to die out...those who eventually got a grip on themselves, restarted industrial development on a huge scale and managed to do to the regenerated Earth in half a millennium what had taken ten the first time...those who chewed up the entire solar system to produce ships and weapons of war, who poured forth in their billions to conquer planet after planet and create what became in all its monstrosity the Last Empire...

...yup, that would be us. Mostly.

And that's how a moribund and all-but-fossilised cultural template got imposed on nine-tenths of the known galaxy. That's the real reason why everyone speaks English, and why so many towns and cities on so many planets look like Milton Keynes. That's why my future is so very, very British.

I'm not proud of it. It's not how I'd have liked my country to blazon its name across the stars. But it makes a bitter kind of sense.