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From Prophecy to Prediction
69
From Prophecy
A serialised survey of the movement
to Prediction
of ideas, developments in predictive
fiction, and first attempts to forecast
the future scientifically:
1 The tale of the future in modern
society
I. F. Clarke
THE readers of these articles could
perhaps be persuaded to accept the
proposition that social fiction is in its
way as effective a means of com-
munication as that other intellectual
invention-the research paper. In their
different ways these provide answers
that deal with the truth of the situa-
tion at any stage in the sequence of
human development or at any point
in the evolution of scientific ideas. The
imaginative narratives the utopias and
the prophecies of the future) investigate
possibilities and look ahead to con-
sequences of every kind. They are
forms of pattern-building which have
developed in step with the pattern-
recognising practices of the sciences; for
just as the Newtons and the Darwins
pursue cause and effect through the
world of nature, so the investigators and
inquisitors of the social order trace the
multiplex connections that make for
delight or despair in human society.
The universal laws of the Principia
Muthematica are equal and parallel to
the universal affirmatives of the Utopia.
The one describes and the other
prescribes; and the combined effect is
Professor I. F. Clarke is Head
of the English
Studies Department Univenity of Strathclyde
Glasgow UK.
to explain the universe of nature and of
human nature.
One proposition leads to another;
and at this point in the fifth millennium
of human civilisation, at the beginning
of another year and the start of a new
series, a backward glance across the
last two centuries will show that
between the facts of science and the
fantasies of fiction we have the para-
meters of technological progress and
social evolution. The vocabularies of
the world languages register the course
of change : railway steamer steamship
pasteurisation vaccination; and forward to
appendicitis genesiology helicopter atomic
bomb heart-transplant sputnik; and on
again to those very recent importations
that arouse the conservationist in the
Frenchman-le quick-freezing le jump-
jet le douite-yourselfe. Language records
the upward movement of the evolu-
tionary curve from steam engine to jet
engine; and the sequence of utopian and
predictive fiction records the com-
parable movement of ideas about
science and society-about industrial
man and technological society-that
have been on the boil for the last two
hundred years. But there is one major
difference. The response to technolo-
gical change does not develop in any
uniform manner :
the graph shows
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70
From Prophecy to Prediction
occasional perturbations in the long
upward rise to the first decade of the
twentieth century, but after the great
divide of the First World War there is
a steady decline towards the doubts,
the hesitations and fears that have
shaped those characteristic modern
fantasies in Brave New World and
~~~~~eell~~~~~~-f~ur.
The scale of the change is apparent
in the differences to be observed both in
attitudes and values between two
visions of the future. The first came
from an American minor poet, Joel
Barlow, who presented the inhabitants
of Plliladelphia in 1807 with a long epic
poem, The Columbiad in which he
rejoiced at the progress of civilisation
and looked forward to the happy world
of the future. Here is the scientist at
work for the benefit of mankind:
From every shape that varying matter
gives
That rests or ripens vegetates or lives
His chymic powers new combinations
plan,
Yield new creations, finer forms to man,
High springs of health for mind and body
trace,
Add force and beauty to the joyous race,
Arm with new engines his adventurous
hand,
Stretch oer these efements his wide
command,
Lay the proud storm submissive at his
feet,
Change, temper, tame all subterranean
heat,
Probe labouring earth and drag from
her dark side
The mute volcano, ere its force be tried;
Walk under ocean, ride the buoyant air,
Brew the soft shower, the labord land
repair,
A fruitful soil oer sandy deserts spread,
And clothe with culture every
mountains head.
The attractive harmony of this
appropriately American ~OUUS rdo sec-
lorum explains why these earlier fore-
casts of the future have been the most
cheerful products of futuristic fiction;
for the iroaic fact is that long ago, in the
days before such words as Flammenwerfeer
and tank had entered the world Ian-
guages,
most of these would-be pre-
dictors lacked the experience and the
knowledge that could have enabled
them to anticipate the problems and
perils of recent times. In 1807, after the
invention of the steam engine and the
discovery of vaccination, there could be
no questioning the immense benefits of
science; but one hundred and thirty-
two years later Aldous Huxley had
second thoughts about the uses mankind
had found for the gifts of science. In the
film-script style of Ape and Essence the
narrative pans across from an aerial
view of London in 1800 to the Arch-
Vicar of Belial summing up human
history, seated in the ruins of California.
Just consider, Huxley tells the reader,
what they were doing during the
century before the Thing. Fouling the
rivers, killing off the wild animals,
destroying the forests, washing the
topsoil into the sea, burning up an
ocean of petroleum, squandering the
minerals it had taken the whoic of
geologica time to deposit. An orgy of
criminal im ecilicity
Here Huxley presents a personal and
spiritual commentary on the state of
our world. He has composed a homily
on good thoughts and right actions
very much in the style of the con-
temporary doom-sayers whom he did
so much to encourage; and yet, if his
ideas could be projected back through
time, with appropriate changes, the
theme of Aje and Essence would find its
natural place as a compelling e.~empl~rn
in any medieval sermon. The vision of
Aldous Huxley in a time-machine
zooming back to cowl and pulpit is not
a grotesque fancy out of science fiction;
for the prophetic spirit common to all
preachers controlled his vision of the
future as surely as it has decided the
forecasts of so many who have looked
into the shape of things to come.
Indeed, the fact that Ape and Essence
first appeared in 1949, a decade before
the emergence of modern futurology,
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Designs from books and illustrated articles by Albert Robida in the period 1880-1900
Illustration of future air travel from the London Illustrated News of 1896
Tank warfare as expected for the twentieth century
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The amusements of bacteriological warfare,as forecast in 1882
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Front Prophecy t o Predi cti on
73
is an indication of the change that has
come over the practice of prediction
since the Second World War. The
proliferation of journals devoted to
forecasting, the growing number of
international conferences about the
future, the establishment of adminis-
trative sections and ministries for
planning, the new societies for futuro-
logists, the think-tanks and the institutes
of the future,
even the university
courses about the future-all these
represent a collective movement away
from prophecy to prediction.
The point is that, although our world
may benefit from the suggestions and
the directions of an Aldous Huxley, the
projections of the ecologists and the
demographers speak with more imme-
diate meaning and carry greater con-
viction than the futuristic visions of
writers of fiction. Once it was not so.
But then the scale of development has
changed since the days of Jules Verne
and H. G. Wells; and the range of
possibilities before our society continues
to widen as the constant advance in
technology speeds up the process of
social change. So, modern technological
forecasting has come into existence in
response
to the requirements of a
society that is far more complex and far
more closely inter-related than any-
thing ever known before. Once it was
possible for one man to survey the
factors making for change in his day, as
Wells did in
Anticipations
and from the
information gathered out of the journals
and the reference books he could
deduce with a fair degree of accuracy
the probable pattern of future develop-
ments. Who could do this today? Who
can hope-on his own-to deal with the
questions of population growth, energy
requirements,
technological develop-
ments, or the state of the Common
Market in the twenty-first century, and
manage as well as Wells did in 1902 ?
Go back from
Anticipations
to the
earliest visions of the future at the
beginning of the last century, and it will
be apparent that the first forecasts
derived from the optimism generated
during the opening stages of the
industrial revolution. As all the great
advances went on throughout the
nineteenth century, the expectation of
universal progress decided the manner
of writing the new fiction. It became
common practice for writers to con-
centrate on some spectacular aspect of
the changes then taking place-the new
warfare in 1870, for example-or they
would select some fact that revealed the
special characteristics of the period-
Hensons successful model aeroplane of
1843, experimental work on submarines
in the 186Os, proposals for the flooding
of the Sahara in the 1870s. Out of these
facts came the typical visions of coming
events so dear to the citizens of the
nineteenth century. After the Henson
experimental aeroplane there was an
outpouring of prints-London, Paris,
Vienna-which displayed airliners of
the future passing over the Pyramids on
their regular run to India. Similarly,
after the unexpected German military
successes in 1870 there was the Batt le of
Dorking
episode in 1871, when Sir
George Tomkyns Chesney alarmed the
nation and interested most of the world
with his account of a successful German
invasion of the United Kingdom.
Again, Jules Verne took the facts of
science and went on to describe the
flying machines and the submarines
that were still to come; or he digested
the arguments for flooding the Sahara
and in his posthumous
Inv asi on de a M er
he described how it would take place.
But in all these accounts of time-to-come
and of inventions still to be developed
there was never any complete and all-
embracing engagement with the future.
The deciding influences in these fore-
casts were either a carefully calculated
bias, as is evident in the Battle of
Dorking
narrative, or such a concentra-
tion on the marvellous, as in Vernes
Cli pper of t he Clouds that these visions of
future time and future developments
could not escape partiality and pre-
judice. They either described techno-
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74 From Prophecy to Prediction
logical changes without any attention
to social consequences, or they used the
blank screen of the future in order to
project the shape of coming wars or of
better societies-changes that owed
more to private hopes and fears than
they did to any exhaustive analysis of
their contemporary world.
The fact is that these tales of the
future-from LAn 2440 in 1771 to
Wellss
World set free
in 19lGwere all
composed in a period of continuing
expectation, and they were meant to be
exemplary. In one way or another they
revealed a future world that would, in
Tennysons phrase, spin for ever
down the ringing grooves of change.
Thus, the extraordinary visual images
of Albert Robida showed the France
of the 1880s a vision of the twentieth
century in which the inventions of a
future war-poison gas, submarines,
bombing planes-work their lethal
effects in a dream-like world that
continues safe and secure in its ways.
In like manner William Morris and
Edward Bellamy, the first in answer to
the second, offered their readers in the
1890s an impossible choice between a
future of total industriafisation and an
earthly paradise of small hand-craft
communities. These ideal states are
characteristic of the then prevailing
attitudes in futuristic fiction. They were
written in the future optative and not in
the future indicative: they represent the
should-be that comes from the private
hopes of individuals and not the
imperative would-be of discernible
social trends. And so, in spite of the
many striking coincidences between the
subsequent achievements of technology
and the earlier anticipations of a world
society, of submarines and gas warfare,
it becomes evident that the imagination
is not completely free. We cannot roam
wherever we desire: we examine possi-
bilities according to the specifications
written into the rule-book of contem-
porary society. Oniy the exceptional
minds can break free from the assump-
tions of their times, and they appear at
rare intervals. Consider, for example,
the prodigious amount of forecasting
that went on in fiction and throughout
the General Staffs of the European
armies during the half century before
the First World War. Out of that
mountain of paper, out of the thousands
who tried to discern the course of the
next great war
only one man, Ivan
Bloch, described exactly the new kind
of warfare that later burst upon the
nations.
All these facts lead to a final pro-
position: the tale of the future played
the role of doppelganger to the new
industrial societies from the time of their
emergence down to the shock of
realisation in the First World War.
From the start these imaginative ac-
counts of the future have played a major
and prophetic role in industrial society.
They have acted as the principal inter-
mediary between the facts of tech-
nological advance and the aspirations
of the new societies. They described
coming changes in the idiom of a pro-
gressive faith; and a prophetic spirit
decided the tone and shaped the form
of their visions, for the general expecta-
tion of continuing change encouraged
the assumption that society would go on
for ever absorbing, and adapting to,
one change or development fter
another
And then came the fearful slaughter of
the Somme and Verdun, when the
application of modern technology to
the waging of war showed that there
had to be a reckoning between science
and society. The time of reckoning
began in the 1920s when the earliest
essays in futurology started; and from
that time to the present day the growing
understanding of the complexities of
industrial society has more and more
decided the practice of seeking out and
analysing the many factors at work in
society. So, the continuing concern of
these new articles will be to plot the
w ys in which the industrialised nations
of the world community have moved
forward from prophecy to prediction.
Omnes
eodem cogimur.
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