How folk yesterday saw the future: lessons from old Sci-Fi for tomorrow

I’ve been rereading dystopian novels from my youth, looking for common themes and relevances to today. After all, if the government can use sci-fi writers to predict the future...

I've been rereading the dystopian novels I first read in my youth, looking for common themes and relevances to today, if any. After all, if the government can use sci-fi writers to predict the future, why shouldn't we all?

(No answers please, I know from editing too many end-of-year tech predictions that trying to foretell the future of humanity and tech in anyway is about as useful as a horoscope in the Daily Mail).

So, first up:

The Shape of Things to Come (1933), HG Wells.

There's a lot to say about Wells' book, and with the passage of time most of it isn't good. He's often quoted out of context for being anti-Jewish, but the truth is that it's not ethnicity he doesn't like (he was fervently anti the Holocaust), it's states dominated by religions he dislikes (he complains about the Irish (Catholicism), Islam and Buddhism with equal passion). For Wells, religion is one of the things holding humanity back from achieving its full potential, which may not quell the wrath some feel for his comments in isolation but they do need to be seen across his work and writings as a whole.

That said in other ways the book has also not stood the test of time well. Yes, he predicts a World War in the 1940s, ICMBs fired from subs, and other things, but he underestimated the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, the far right dictators of Europe who would cause such havoc shortly after the book's publication, while he also correctly dismisses Stalin as narrow and unintelligent without seeing his potential to be a bloody mass murderer.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is the notion of a world exhausted by three decades of war which is saved from starvation by a collaboration of corporations who band together to form a global air force to bring peace and food to the starved nations of the earth. This is done by formation of an Air Dictatorship led by corporations, which limits personal ownership or means of production and distribution but somehow allows free enterprise and entrepreneurship without ownership of land or property that could belong to others (much is unexplained). This also shows a shocking waste of the world's resources as things like clothes are just thrown away after use: minus several million brownie points for missing out on the green agenda.

Also, the Air Dictatorship is a dictatorship, whose bloody path to achieve world peace (including an indoctrination programme in schools and forced acceptance of English as common lingua franca) is only mentioned in passing.

One of the worst aspects of the book, and sadly much of Wells' writing generally, is his acceptance of a belief in eugenics and the superiority of white people over all over ethnicities as fact. He assumes the extermination of the Jews will happen not because he wants it but because the eugenicists of the time saw this as inevitable in some authoritarian state, a massive problem when rereading the book today. Despite his supposedly liberal-left reputation, Wells was a man of Empire and it shows.

As a vision of the future, the 1936 film is much better, particularly in its earlier scenes and in its depiction of a plague-like walking sickness that predates the zombie-apocalypse genre of movies we're currently enjoying (suffering?) by a good 70 years while the most important legacy of the film and book is the notion of a world exhausted of food, water and materials that would become a common theme in the 1960s and 70s sci-fi, particularly in things like John Christopher's Death of Grass and Make Room! Make Room!. Meanwhile the corporatism of the Air Dictatorship has echoes in films Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Westworld, Jurassic Park and the book Logan’s Run.

Overall, watch the 1936 film Things to Come and ignore the book that’s supposedly its source inspiration.

La Planete Des Singes (1963) (or Monkey Planet/Planet of the Apes), Pierre Boulle

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Michael Avallone

Planete Des Singes is an often overlooked French novel that found fame as a Hollywood series and later franchise, which is a pity because the book is so much more intriguing than the film and spin-offs.

The book charts the adventures of a team of French astronauts to travel through time to visit a planet in the orbit of Betelgeuse. Really a Swiftian conceit in the style of Gulliver's Travels, the book is in three parts. French astronaut/journalist Ulysees' (the name is telling) arrival with two companions and his capture by the apes who dominate the planet they arrive on; his treatment, humiliation and final winning of his freedom from the intelligent apes; and the discovery that everything the apes have was due to a former human civilisation that became effete and lost its voice (literally) through sloth and inability to innovate as the apes kept as pets and servants gradually took over.

A theme of the book is the inability of species to adapt - the book hints the apes are going the same way as their human predecessors as they have made no technological developments since they assumed mastery of their world - and the blindness of government to the need to adapt, change and accept facts. A strong message in the age of Trump, Johnson and denial of scientific evidence in the era of Covid.

But perhaps the most important feature of the book is the theme of exhausted societies running out of ideas and unable to adapt to necessary change; of peoples unwilling or unable to see what needs to be done to save themselves even if it's staring them in the face. In that it shares features in common with other dystopian books I'm reading.

One subplot explores how the human scientist who planned to mission finds happiness in his reduced human state, similar to the blindness of the ape governor scientists to the facts about their past they refuse to accept: each savant is happier in their ignorance. Another explores the cruelty of species using other animals for experimentation.

The shock ending of the original film is now much parodied, but it is reflected in twin revelations at the end of the book, which is a story within a story, that have as much power as the cinematic version.

I read this, in the original French, in conjunction with a movie adaptation novel of the sequel to the first film. I find novelisations of the era often superior to fiction of the time, and the writing of Avallone, a talented chap, is worth reading for itself. Movie adaptations also often contained elements of script that the film-makers left out, though here the presiding genius was scriptwriter Paul Dehn.

The notion of a race of underground mutants, not a creation of Boulle, has more in keeping with Wells' Morlocks from The Time Machine or the enslaved workers at the machines in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but their possession of a working nuclear bomb and telepathic powers are truly nightmarish additions.

The notion of a civilisation underground also has resonances with Wells' script for Things to Come (1936), Logan's Run (the film of 1976) and The Ultimate Warrior (also 1976). Again, the theme of a lack of resources is strong: in the original novel, the ape civilisation is as advanced as 1950s/60s France, while the ape planet of the films is a more backward, agrarian society living without the aid of modern appliances.

Make Room! Make Room! (1966), Harry Harrison

Most people will know of this book, if they know it at all, because of the subversive 1973 film adaptation, Soylent Green, with its famed shock ending.

I first saw the film at an all-night sci-fi film show in Brighton in about 1976 with Logan's Run, Westworld and The Omega Man among others. It left an indelible mark and I hunted out the book, which initially disappointed me because, yes, it's much the same story but Soylent Green isn't made out of people.

I'm not sure Make Room! is even really science fiction in the way the other books I'll look at are. It's one of the best researched novels I've ever read, with a bigger bibliography than many a factual book, which includes the likes of Bruno Bettelheim's Informed Heart (interesting interview with him here https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/.../bruno-bettelheim...), which postulates that people and species that survive dreadful situations are able to jettison unnecessary things from their lives, even in situations like concentration camps (Bettelheim did; this may be oversimplification but he's fascinating to listen to on this subject).

Bettelheim was one of those writers I read at university and Harrison's attention to expertise in his bibliography is one of the things that brings me back to this book. You could spend a year just looking at the references.

Again, I now realise it's so much better than the film. The overcrowded world, with poverty stricken people living in cars, seems like something out of Ready Player One, and the depiction of people fighting for survival in an overcrowded world starved of resources is Hunger Games all over.

Meanwhile, the idea of a cop in an overcrowded city looking for a killer because of pressure from city hall has echoes of Blade Runner and Dirty Harry.

Nightmarish in the sense of claustrophobia it engenders, the story's depiction of empty shelves in the supermarkets and water from turnpikes that is too dirty to drink seems to have particular resonance in post-brexit Britain one can only hope won't get any stronger.

Again, an exhausted depleted society is the theme of the book, emblematic of the fears of the Silent Spring generation that was just waking up to the environmental needs of the planet humanity was plundering.

Like 1984, a book for our time, and a book for any time.

As an aside, I was a huge Harry Harrison fan growing up, particularly the Stainless Steel Rat books, whose wit and humour preceded The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by several years. I also like the fact Harrison moved from the States and lived in Dublin and Brighton for many years, the latter he also died in. I didn't get to meet him but would have like to have told him how much seeing Soylent Green in the place he and I both lived affected me all those years ago.

Logan's Run (1967), William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson

Where to start with this? Logan's Run, at first glance, has little to do with the more famous 1976 film of the same name, but once you delve into it the building blocks of the film's story - the Sandmen (also confusingly in the book called Deep Sleep Men, far more menacing), the fight on the plastic surgery table, the meeting with Box in the ice cave, the climax in a decayed Washington D.C., the pursuit of Logan and Jessica by Francis - are all there.

But the book is a piece of 1960s psychedelia, mixing drug-culture references with a kind of Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange, type language that can become tiresome and make it hard to follow.

Additionally, after rereading it following a long span (and it's probably the book I've reread most on this list), I also now realise that it it really nothing more than a series of episodes, a homage to the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, but on acid, in which our heroes are saved from certain death by an increasingly outrageous series of deus ex machina.

The plot differs from the film in that people voluntarily die at 21 instead of 30, there is no promised "renewal" of resurrection (which makes the acceptance of willing suicide by the masses more understandable plot-wise). There is also an uncomfortable diversion into a robot recreation of a US Civil War battle that eulogises the myth of the southern states fighting for freedom rather than struggling to retain wealth on a slave-based economy that seems distasteful today. However, it balances that out by paying homage to Crazy Horse and native American peoples. An odd juxtaposition.

The book does tease out how the world became as it is in the story in short bursts, none of which are totally satisfactory plot-wise. The chief crux is, as it is partly in Make Room!, a conflict between age and youth and a failure to control birth rates that has led to mass over population. Indeed, you could read into Logan's Run that the population in Make Room! had had enough, killed the old people, decided that the planet could only take so many people and set up a global computer system that controlled the population to a certain number by ensuring everyone dies at 21. Even when that was no longer necessary, the machine and the system kept functioning.

As a story, in a drugged-up Flash Gordon kind of way, Logan's Run is actually entertaining, but it leaves so many plot holes and problems when considering the age of the people involved (nursery upbringing till 7, education till 14, everyone has to have a job, presumably living off some kind of universal basic income until they euthanise voluntarily at 21) that the kind of maturity demanded of the characters seems impossible to imagine on a mass scale (before anyone screams at this, remember what you and your friends were like at 21 and multiply that by a planetary population).

The most important element for me in the story on this revisit was the slowly breaking down AI (let's call it that) based on solid-state circuits (hail the microchip!) that provides all the basic needs of people living in cities.

However, this AI is slowly breaking down. Parts of the network are "offline", such as Cathedral, where the violent cubs hang out, the underwater sea lab Molly and a Washington D.C. inhabited by wild animals after the escape of zoo creatures, all places where the Sandmen are unable to track the escaping runners. Not only that but, unlike the film, the society is irretrievably breaking down, presumably because no one has the skills, experience, knowledge or foresight that only comes with age, to realise they need to repair things. The world of Logan in the book is not the shiny city of the film, more a kind of Blade Runner-esque façade without the rain!

Conclusions

So, drawing on these stories an a few others, notably The Ultimate Warrior, Bill S Ballinger (1973), The Death of Grass, John Christopher (1956), Westworld, Michael Crichton (1973) and Quatermass, Nigel Kneale (1978), I will have a go at extrapolating some thoughts on possible policy areas that are being overlooked, forgotten or largely ignored by governments, certainly in the west and advanced societies today, that may a more urgent focus.

This is not me predicting the future, but just shining a light on areas that the dystopian fiction of the past can better illuminate than recent attempts by government to use fiction.

What the past got wrong about the future...

To start with, let's consider what the writers of the past got wrong. Wells was wrong to predict the slow decline of humanity due to everlasting war, though you have to remember the world in which he lived was one of continual wars between European countries both at home and abroad, so it would not have seemed so outrageous at the time. But he did predict the ICBM, a global pandemic and a kind of corporate dictatorship, which perhaps we're seeing starting today.

Harrison was wrong that the world could not feed 7 billion or more people and that birth rates would continue to rise, where as in industrialised countries in Europe and Asia birth rates are falling (the opposite problem in effect).

What they got right was a world falling apart at the seams, with law enforcement officers unable to fulfil basic duties, overstuffed hospitals, uncaring governments more obsessed with electoral survival than caring for people, and a world where "entertaining diversions", from drugs to "celeb" influencers, distract people from what's real and what needs to be done. The satirical Titty Bumpity show from Quatermass made reality.

To sum up...

AI: Few of the books talk about computers and tech in depth, but all are imbued with it, from the weapons of mass destruction and ultra modern cities and use of air power in Wells to the social security card system in Harrison, to the tracing haptic sensor technology in Logan's Run, to the global AI system in the same book, to the spacecraft in Planet of the Apes and Quatermass. Of course, the notion of AI as we have now, and the fears of it, were not so prevalent when the books were written so it is not a concern of those times, but the idea of a civilisation run by computer that controls the fate of humanity, which dies out when the computer collapses, was first proposed by EM Forster in his 1909 story The Machine Stops. Similarly, artificially intelligent man-like machines destroying humanity first appeared in Czech writer Karel Čapek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots. Indeed, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, first published almost 100 years earlier than RUR, has the roots of the same idea as its seed.

I believe AI is not the threat to mankind people make it out to be while its benefits are likely to be mixed. I do not think AI will destroy mankind on its own. It is, as people are finding out with chatbots, a quicker form of finding information, but most of this is just gleaned from often inaccurate info on Google. AI could not write a critical piece like this, could not draw the conclusions I will draw, and cannot replicate human "genius". It may make work easier and it may drive down the incomes of groups such as writers and accountants, but I personally doubt even that will last long. However, on the notion of "singularity", development of RUR-style machines that can destroy humanity, they will only destroy the world if people tell it to. The notion of armies of killer bots, a la Star Wars, ain't ever going to happen because A) the technology doesn't exist and B) it'd be so flipping expensive no general would want to waste it on a battlefield when human cannon fodder would do just as well, so stop wasting time and energy on it. And don't worry about AI writing fake news when the Daily Mail and most of today's right-wing press do a much better job of this and have done for decades. (See the Zinoviev letter and recent attempts by the Mail to rewrite its fascist-Nazi-Hitler supporting past.)

Policy ideas: Rather than fearing AI, instead try to use data more to improve health and education of populations, particularly say charting what foods people are buying and suggesting healthier options, or monitoring exercise, or suggesting cutting down on screen time, etc.

Civilisation in decline: All of the books mentioned chart a civilisation in decline. This is either due to overpopulation, war or disease or, as in the case of Quatermass and La Planete Des Singes, humans simply giving up on any form of development or endeavour as governments strive to invoke a past glorious age that never truly existed to cover up the serious lack of initiative, resources and funding. This theme has echoes in all the books, and also in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which fake personalities, famous for being famous, inhabit TV screens to keep the population's mind off the world's real ills. This 1968 novel has disturbing relevance to today's influencer culture, in that you don't know if who's trying to influence you is human or not, nor their intentions.

Right now decline in industrialised nations seems inevitable, largely due to poor policy: the myth of low taxation, the blaming of the poor, disabled or migrant populations, as well as LGBTQ folk, for civilisation's ills rather than facing up to the root causes of it: these are the lack of political will, inability to address long-standing inequalities because of entrenched ideological views, the desire to invoke some sort of past national glory or racial and sexual identity for easy electoral success, the inability of people to confront change. All point to a failure to address the real problems (climate change, demographic change, pollution and an overreliance on fossil fuels) that will have catastrophic results if not dealt with. And, as Bettelheim points out, if you can't adapt, then decline and death - both individual and societal - follow.

Policy ideas:

1) Overcome government inaction: Governments need to stop messing around by trying to win electoral terms every 4-5 years and instead focus on the bigger issues confronting them. They cannot solve these problems alone but need to work jointly and at a global level to tackle these problems and on plans that are longer than 5 or even 10 years. This is difficult and won't be made easier by the current culture wars, funded largely by interest groups like the oil industry. But there are only about 50 years of fossil reserves left, so rather than cause more climate change by using them, it's time to start investing in renewables and nuclear quite possibly, and start telling people this is going to affect their lifestyles, whether they like it or not. Because they certainly won't like what will happen if governments don't act.

2) Age v Youth: A common theme in lots of these stories is that of age versus youth. So far we've not seen the explosion of violence along these lines that are on display in Logan's Run and Make Room!, but given the amount of violence in France over pensions reform, and the UK government scrapping plans to announce a rise in the state pension age for younger workers, it is more than time to tackle wealth inequality. The simplest way would be in the form of universal basic income, or UBI, which many economists state industrial nations could afford. It need not cover every cost, but would give everyone a stake in the community and the ability to invest more in themselves and society, which has been the case in any longitudinal studies on this I've seen. It should also appeal to the rightists quoting libertarian beliefs as it would give people more autonomy over their own lives.

Similarly, states need to invest more in education, especially life-long learning, not just in technical skills but also in the arts and leisure, which are already booming industries and will become more so in future.

3) Housing: While the parking-lot hotels of Make Room! have not yet come to being, affordability of housing, both in rental and purchasing terms, has fallen out of the reach of many, especially younger people. More social housing that is not determined by businesses but by local authorities or charities is urgently needed. As a matter of urgency, this needs to be addressed to avoid future conflicts between age and youth.

4) The risks of corporatism: For too long, governments have cut back from trying to run anything, be it social housing to welfare or space programmes, and left them for markets and companies to run. This is simply unsustainable because free markets never solved any problems, just exacerbated them, such as inequality (the homes rental market and US health are good examples). Similarly, tech companies should not be allowed to sponge off people's data for free or to own the intellectual copyright of things that have to power to control humanity. Better regulation and international agreements on ethics, morals and use of technology, as we have in areas of health such as cloning and nuclear technology, would help not only protect citizens but better target resources towards improving humanity's lot, as in some of the health ideas outlined above.

5) Cultural divide and ethnicity: Perhaps unsurprisingly, as all of the books I've written about are by white men, there is little discussion of ethnicity and colour/cultural divide in these stories. While Wells was wrong in many of his 1930s prognostications, he actually did talk about race, and eerily did predict the holocaust, though not that Hitler would cause it. The lessons of intolerance of others is there for all to see, exemplified in the form of a belief in eugenics that was widespread at the time: its advocates included Churchill and it was widely practised in the USA, and seemingly in some states it still is.

While this seems like history, much of the politics of today seems to centre on reviving these eugenics-type arguments, as so much government and parliamentary opposition endeavour is devoted to stirring up fears and hatred of "others", be they "migrants," "refugees" or "the woke", it is clearly an area that needs addressing. I see none of the talentless burkes who wrote the government's sci-fi seem to have addressed it either.

Yet it is not the overabundance of people that threatens economies like the UK, but the lack of people in the right age brackets. Currently only Africa has nations that have positive fertility and nothing industrialised nations can do in the next 50 years is likely to be able to address that shortfall. So opening up our borders to people of different colours and religions is not only a good thing to do, it is necessary and, as climate change worsens, it is the right thing to do. So stop bellyaching about it and bloody get on with explaining to people, particularly I suspect older generations, that change is coming and they need to prepare for it and will be better off as a result.

6) Invest more in the environment: This should really go without saying, but developing transport networks not dependent on motorcars, greening landscapes and cleaning plastic out of the oceans and forever chemicals out of the atmosphere and land should be happening now, not be subject to culture war guff funded by interest groups not interested in the future of humanity.

A few final thoughts...

One cannot, and should not, use fiction to predict the future, but science fiction is as much a reflection of the time it was written in as it is any form of prognostication. The fears of the 1960s and 70s of a destructive nuclear war have not come to pass and, despite the efforts of Putin, do not seem to obsess people in the same way as it did in the 1960s-80s.

Technology, particularly use of data, can be used to oppress people, and while this has an appeal to totalitarians across the political spectrum, it is perhaps even more worrying that private companies, some coming to rival governments in economic size, are looking to use this data against us and manipulate us - via the politicians in their pockets - to do their will, however much it may not be in our own best interests to do as they suggest.

The only thing that I see will stop this is governments looking to seize power back, by taking control and ownership of the things governments should be running, and stopping themselves from abdicating responsibility for the things they should be doing. It's a big demand and would take a lot of guts, but I see no way that anything will be done about the pressing matters I've discussed without them doing so.

And really finally, how will you know if a government is doing what it should? Look for signs of positive change. Look for better public transport and fewer cars. Look for grass and solar panels on roofs. Look for economic growth that doesn't come from continuous new products but from recycling and environmental improvements, as redefining of what is meant by economic growth is long overdue. And look for a world that is more welcoming and in which you feel welcome.

If you see that, you will be seeing true change. And if I were to write a fiction with the goal of influencing government, it would contain those things.