by Ben Winters
Reality is always such a kick in the pants. Dreaming up the havoc that Y2K would wreak upon the universe was a terrific hoot for those of us in the media, and for those of us hunkering down in our rec rooms, ready to eat canned meat and play ping pong right up until Kingdom Come. Such a shame that the course of events ruined all our fun: No planes fell from the sky, no nukes were mistakenly sent sailing across the ocean, no urban reservoirs were inexplicably pumped full of cyanide.
It just goes to show that people who say what's going to happen in the future are never, ever right. Rational economists, tarot readers, religious fundamentalists and Vegas odds-makers can predict and wager until the cows come home, but, as each new day dawns, the world follows its own stubbornly unpredictable path.
In the century just gone by, the most interesting prognostication was performed by the practitioners of the infant literary genre called science fiction. Fascinated by rapid technological advances and the possibilities of space travel, they tried to imagine what our world—heck, our universe—would be like in a hundred or a thousand years. Writers like Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card; books like L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield: Earth," Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax." (A stretch, perhaps, but a case could be made—in fact, be assured that somewhere, on the Internet, a case has been made). In movies it was everything from "Metropolis" to "Alien" to (sigh) "Bicentennial Man," based, however loosely, on the Isaac Asimov novella.
Now that all the nines have finally rolled over into zeroes, and the millennium is upon us, it's as good a time as any to take stock of all these futures contained in our past. Of course they were pretty much all wrong, but some of the arrows, shot forward through the years and decades, came closer to the mark than others. So just what kind of world are we living in compared to that of, say, "A Clockwork Orange," the groundbreaking and infamous 1962 novel by Brit Anthony Burgess? (It is, however, the Stanley Kubrick movie that generated much of the mythology, and is responsible for the posters hanging on all the dorm room walls, not to mention the obligatory Halloween party guest with the all-white outfit, black derby, eye makeup and cane.)
"A Clockwork Orange," like all the best science fiction, and all the decent hallucinogens, creates its own reality. The people of Burgess' future speak their own language (in "nadsat," they use the Russian word for friend, "droogs," and something spectacular is "real horrorshow"), and the real world is tweaked just enough so we can recognize it and still be creeped out by it. (The protagonist and his droogs hang out at a milk bar, which is just your basic bar except that everyone is drinking spiked milk, which is served from the nipple of a marble nude.)
But the real horrorshow thing about "A Clockwork Orange" is the violence— "the old ultra-violence," as Burgess calls it—and this is where his sci-fi prognosticating come closest to the mark. As shocking as it is to see our anti-hero and his droogs brutally attacking their helpless victims, it's a thousand times more shocking to see Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris smirking from the pages of Time magazine, and to read their gleeful prediction of their coming infamy. One of the imaginative leaps of Burgess' novel was the sheer cold callousness of his youthful killers, their devil-may-care attitude about inflicting pain and death. Thirty-seven years later, a story about kids killing other kids better have a pretty strong hook, or it won't even make it to the front page.
Our humble city may be closest to fulfilling Burgess' nightmare visions, what with being the murderingest berg in the country and all, at almost 700 slayings in 1998 alone. (In 1999 this number would drop sharply.) Hardly any of these killers are wearing black derby hats, of course, but ultra-violence? You betcha.
"A Clockwork Orange" also plays around with ideas of prison reform and rehabilitation. Alex is deprogrammed through a forced binge on violent cinema, until the very idea of harming someone causes him physical upset. Burgess seems to have completely struck out on that prediction, at least as far as the U.S. goes. Hardly has a step been taken since 1962 to find alternative means of rehabilitating criminals—except, of course, for chain gangs, faith-based prisons (a fave of George W. Bush) and wrongful capital convictions. America now has more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the world, about 45,000 convicts in Illinois alone, and none of them, so far as we know, are strapped to chairs with their eye-lids clamped open watching "Triumph of the Will."
A touch more lighthearted than "A Clockwork Orange," the Jetsons were to the future what the Flintstones were to the past: The perfect 1950s American family—lovable everyman George Jetson; Jane, his wife; his boy, Elroy; and so forth. Like workaday stiffs throughout time and space, George had a nine-to-five grind, a crotchety boss (Mr. Spacely), and the occasional vacation, preferably to resort planet Venus.
But the heart and soul of the show was all the gadgetry, much of which has indeed come to pass. Flying cars, not yet. Moving walkways, yes, though generally to be found only at airports and casinos. Though the instant food machine isn't a reality yet, there is no shortage of instant food, and, of course, there's our radioactive friend the microwave. In other words, if you can't wait two-and-a-half minutes for your popcorn, you can just rip open a bag of Vintner's. Video phone technology is now available, but who wants it? Why deprive ourselves of the pleasures of making the "yap yap yap" hand gesture to a friend in the room while talking to another, more irritating friend on the phone? Or of calling in sick when already dressed for a day at the beach?
(A private note to the startling number of people who administrate "The Jetsons" Web pages. In answer to your intriguing questions like "Why did George sit in traffic even though there's no roads in space?", I propose the following answer: Because it's a fucking TV show).
On that note, let's re-enter the world of grim dystopias with Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Like "A Clockwork Orange," Atwood's most famous novel is a chilling vision of the near future that was later made into a pretty solid movie, this one co-starring Natasha Richardson and Robert Duvall, in his charming-but-slightly-unsettling mode. Atwood's focus is on reproductive rights; what puts the "dys" in her dystopia is the complete powerlessness of the female population after nuclear fallout has left most of them sterile. Those whose pipes still work serve as "handmaids," surrogate mothers who enable elite families to have the babies they can't have themselves, what with being symbols of evil and all.
It's not surprising that these are Atwood's concerns, considering that, in the heart of the eighties, when she was writing, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the religious right was gaining power like a snowball rolling down a hill, and the Equal Rights Amendment was several years dead. Likely plaguing Atwood as she created her ugly vision of the future were all the unanswered questions of the feminist movement: How to guarantee equal work for equal pay? How to create a world where reproductive freedom was a basic human right?
Luckily, by century's end, all of these questions have been answered, except for essentially all of them. Women's wages hover nowadays at around 75 percent of men's; not only is the glass ceiling still a reality, women of color face what amounts to a concrete ceiling that slowly descends to crush them, like the trash compactor on the Death Star. As far as reproductive rights, Missouri's legislature drafted in 1999 something called the Infant Protection Act, which treats Roe v. Wade as if it were the decision of Jughead from "Archie Comics," rather than that of the United States Supreme Court.
But as far as Atwood's specific vision, we see nothing like it, as long as we look specifically within this country. Good thing there's the Taliban, the zany ultra-fundamentalist Islamic group that controls most of Afghanistan and has huge political sway in Pakistan (where, some claim, the whole movement originated) and elsewhere. If it wasn't for the Taliban, the idea of a repressive government that treats women (at least twelve million of them in Afghanistan alone) entirely as chattel and blames rape on the victim as a matter of legislative course would just be so much fantastical fiddle-faddle.
Points, then, can be awarded to Atwood, leaving us to turn to the most well-known of our futuristic fairy tales, George Orwell's famous vision of the year 1984. By now the idea of Big Brother watching is more a cliché than anything else, a jokey trope for camp counselors and prom chaperones. But as we learned from "The Usual Suspects," the greatest trick the devil ever played is convincing us he didn't exist, and the same can be said for the ever-present, ever-watchful governmental eyes imagined by Orwell to convince his readers of the importance of protecting democracy.
New technology like digital cameras and the World Wide Web have created new vistas of opportunity for potential snooping. Forget about Web cams: Any time you authorize a Web page to put a "cookie" on your hard drive—the little nugget of sense memory that enables amazon.com to say "Hello, Benjamin A. Winters!" when I go to their home page—you're also opening yourself up to surreptitious monitoring from third parties, like other Web pages, online advertisers or, what the hey, the National Security Agency. And, not to alarm you, but high-resolution, digital videotaping is going on all the time. A survey of all sorts of companies in 1997 revealed that 75 percent of them use surveillance equipment, on both employees and customers. Governments are busily putting up cameras on street corners, public transportation systems (the CTA, for example, shelled out $3.1 million last year to equip a quarter of its bus fleet with digital cams), and, naturally, in the public schools (including at least fifteen high schools in Chicago).
But what Orwell couldn't have known was how fun it would all be, all the Fox specials like "Caught on the Job" and "When Good Animals Go Bad." All he cared about was boring old fascism—which takes us to "Brave New World."
The twentieth was a century that lived in constant fear of dictators and Communists, goose-stepping Nazis and Red Chinese; little wonder that our fears of an all-powerful government were played out so often in our sci-fi visions, from "Planet of the Apes" to "The Matrix." Nowhere is this so evident as in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," with its World Controllers, caste system and careful biological tampering to create a perfectly conditioned citizenry.
But of course this was all just nonsense, as was the anti-information state of "Fahrenheit 451" and the baroque bureaucracy of "Brazil." It's clear now that democracy won, right? Sure, there's a Nazi or two in Berwyn, but as our sputtering, red-faced mayor pointed out to reporters fearful of New Year's Eve terrorism, "This is a democracy!" What with the Berlin Wall a distant memory, Russia a thriving (ahem) democracy, and Slobodan Milosevic handily swatted by NATO's air strikes of freedom, it's clear that free market capitalism and social democracy have kicked fascist and commie ass up and down the globe.
Except, of course, for that dreadful Taliban. Plus North Korea and, of course, Cuba. Oh, and China. Certainly, though, the century at hand will no doubt be full of exciting changes in the way the world operates, one or two of which may even be accurately predicated by imaginative fiction.
Unfortunately, the piecemeal technological advancements—things like e-mail, flat TVs hung like paintings, portable phones that dangle from the ear—happen subtly, bit by bit, so that it would take someone awaking suddenly like Rip Van Winkle to truly be awed and amazed by it all. Meanwhile, the background elements that define human civilization—for example, the tendency of those in power to abuse it—don't ever seem to change much at all.
Finally, in all the speculations of the last hundred years, the one that seems to have hit closest to the mark comes not from Asimov or Heinlein, but from two gentlemen named Tom Greene and Glen A. Larson, the principal writers on a little TV show called "Knight Rider." Thanks to new automotive and satellite technologies, the idea of a super-intelligent car that knows where you want to go and how to get you there is fast becoming a reality. How long can it be before said car is also capable of patronizing you in a sleek, slightly effeminate voice, and getting you out of jams involving super-criminals and fast chases?
It is a brave new world, indeed.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.