futures volume 6 issue 1 1974 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2874%2990009-3] i.f. clarke -- 1. the tale of...

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 6 Issue 1 1974 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2874%2990009-3] I.F. Clarke -- 1. the Tale of the Fu

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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

FUTURES February 874


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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,

FUTURES February 39 4


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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

E


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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-



6/6

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.


futures volume 6 issue 1 1974 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2874%2990009-3] i.f. clarke -- 1. the tale of...

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