Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk’s Podcast, my friends. Today I’ll be exploring why our culture abandoned any ideas of a better culture and what role, if any, science-fiction played in this.
The best way to enjoy this episode is to tap on the podcast play button right now and listen to it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to the article below.
Art is a mirror that shows us who we are as individuals and as a culture, as I am always very quick to point out. Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw felt similarly, though he disagreed with my phrasing. “You use a glass mirror to see your face,” he said. “You use works of art to see your soul.”
But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if this reaction to the question “what is art?” represents a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy for our species. Maybe it’s because my children are getting older and I now struggle with how our propensity of attacking faults actually reinforces the idea, especially in children, that they are only the faults you repeatedly identify them as.
Put another way: is it possible that holding a mirror up to our culture is actually perpetuating its worst, most self-destructive qualities?
Which brings me to playwright and poet Berthold Brecht, who vehemently disagreed with me and Shaw in this matter. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality,” he argued, “but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Art is a multifaceted cultural tool, far more so than my personal relationship to it, and Brecht might very well be right. Our society has increasingly slipped into a dystopian fixation that offers no vision for the future other than survival. I worry we’ve become narcissistically lost in our reflection when what we’re really looking for is a way out of this mess.
If you’re unsure what I mean, consider how politicians generally campaign today. On one side, the so-called Right sells you ideas of a golden age out of the past you can return to if you re-embrace wildly unequal social structures. On the other, the so-called Left increasingly begs you to get rid of the other guys so sometime in the future, maybe, things will maybe return to normal.
This means the average voter in the West (where I can speak most confidently on matters such as these) is stuck choosing between parties that support returning to the past or treading water indefinitely — neither of which suggest any forward momentum, nor are even possible. Time travel doesn’t exist and even the strongest swimmer eventually runs out of energy and drowns.
Meanwhile, the future keeps coming — ever more terrifying.
Science-fiction, our most effective and popular genre to explore the future in storytelling, is just as lost as our broader culture.
The hope and optimism for humankind’s tomorrows that was pervasive from the start of the 20th century until the end of the Space Race in 1975 has been replaced by a reflection of who we’ve increasingly become instead. Decades of grim sci-fi futures, the kind that none of us would want to spend even one day in, have accompanied our actual culture’s intellectual regression and slip-and-slide into genuine dystopia – begging a thorny question about the storytellers’ part in, to reference the role of the disapproving parent again, inadvertently convincing society there is nothing worth striving for anymore.
Humankind is staring down one existential threat after another. There is a very real sense that collapse is imminent, the stuff we’ve culturally masturbated to in fiction, films, and television for 50 years now. But despite this, the best our storytellers seem capable of anymore is imagining how we’ll hack and slash and shoot our way out of it.
It’s the problem with the conflict narrative, of course. In such narratives, we externalize a threat, imagine how our heroes will fight it, and call it a day when they win the day. What is on the other side of victory is irrelevant. Most often, what we’re fighting for is irrelevant, too. Survival is all that matters.
But what if survival isn’t our problem as a culture?
Because I’m increasingly convinced our real problem is a self-inflicted lack of imagination about what kind of world we want to live in on the other side of this nightmare.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s worth considering how the future looked in the first seven decades of the 20th century. In magazines, newspapers, and on film and TV screens, the future was…well, it was fucking awesome. The possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was background noise compared to the optimism society felt for what was coming humanity’s way. Flying cars, flying trains, flying cities - I mean, the future had it all. We weren’t just going to the Moon, we were going to Mars, we were going to the Outer Solar System, we were going to alien worlds we weren’t even sure existed yet.
It might seem ludicrous to you today that a population could believe such things were imminently possible, but consider telephones and cars were obscurities at the turn of the 20th century, but commonplace 25 years later. Commercial flight kicked off in 1914 when we didn’t even have sound films yet. The home television made its first appearance in the late-20s and by the 50s had become fixtures in many homes. The Soviets put a human in space in 1961 and a mere eight years later the United States put one on the Moon. In 70 years, life on Earth had become entirely unrecognizable when measured against the entirely of human history that had preceded it.
When families around the world gathered to watch Neil Armstrong say, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t be followed by countless similar leaps into unimagined tomorrows.
Don’t believe me? Here are some examples of how the “future” was imagined in the media between 1900 and 1975 (be sure to click on each and read the vision of tomorrow being sold to the public):
On September 12th, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy took the stage at Rice University in Houston, Texas to address his nation's efforts in space exploration. This is how many of our world leaders used to talk about the future and what we should want from it.
“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the Moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
“….We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Not quite a year later, on Aug. 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the whole nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He wasn’t concerned with technological advances, as John F. Kennedy was. He was consumed by another kind of dream of what our future should look like.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
“….This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
Three years later, on September 8th, 1966, “Star Trek” premiered on NBC in the United States. It was destined to become one of the most significant science-fiction franchises in human history. Creator Gene Roddenberry predicated his series on the notion that tribalism, capitalism, and war on Earth would be followed by not just human brotherhood – to use Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s terminology – but galactic brotherhood. He promised us that John F. Kennedy and King’s dreams would be realized and equality, scientific exploration, and socialism were what we could look forward to if we did the work and kept the faith.
One month after “Star Trek” was canceled in 1969, John F. Kennedy’s promise of putting a man on the Moon became a reality. By then, he and Martin Luther King, Jr. were dead, gunned down by assassins. So was Robert Kennedy and so many other great Americans who demanded more for us.
Humankind had achieved the seemingly impossible, but the hope, vision, and conviction that had consumed the middle part of the American century was quickly giving way to a kind of economic exuberance best suited to a civilization convinced it didn’t have long to live.
Throughout the 80s, grotesque excess that should’ve suggested futures of abundance collided with the fear that the world was changing so fast that annihilation could be its only outcome. Dystopian visions of tomorrow thrived and multiplied like Mogwai in a Turkish bathhouse in this environment, from Blade Runner to The Terminator and its first sequel, to Mad Max and Escape from New York, to so many of the direct-to-video genre films I gobbled up as a kid.
The future was a scary place, no question about it — or so we were now told over and over.
Think about how technology quickly began to exceed our imaginations and cultural wisdom at this point in history. Jurassic Park, released in 1994, understood this, as the entire film is predicated on our species’ hubris putting us in a Daedalus-like position.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should,” Dr. Ian Malcom says in the film, offering up what I would argue is the most important line of dialogue ever put on celluloid.
Yes, the film – and the novel from Michael Crichton it’s adapted from – are intended as warnings, as so much of science-fiction is, but the result of this “adventure 65 million years in the making” aligns with the premise of this essay…the future has become something to be terrified of, in this case because “capitalism and science will kill us all”.
Our technophobia – but really, fear of change – counterintuitively accelerated through the rest of the 90s and the first decade of the 21st century as we were introduced to the home computer and the world wide web, mobile phones and the internet in our pockets, social media and streaming our favorite music and films and TV on a whim.
We were seemingly experiencing “the future” we were promised, and yet our social bonds were fraying and snapping all around us thanks to cable television’s growing partisanship, streaming, and globalization in general. What I mean is, we were spending less and less time together — read Robert D. Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000) for more on this) — and more time alone with a great, big scary world that had started to bark at us every time we sat down at our computers or checked our mobile phones.
This irony is never lost on me. As the world got bigger, our identities and ability to communicate began to fracture, we turned on each other with a kind of enthusiasm that felt a century out of step, and the most powerful amongst us crawled into the cracks and hammered wedges in even deeper until whole fissures opened up between friends, families, and communities that once seemed unimaginable.
Science-fiction storytellers, always quick to lean into our worst qualities as a species, did not disappoint. When danger is spotted on the horizon, their role has always been to clamber up the tower, take the rope in both hands, and ring the warning bell with everything they’ve got.
But I think it’s fair to say that by the second decade of the 21st century, dystopian fiction – and its many film and TV adaptations – had begun to feed on its own success. The Hunger Games (2008), a YA novel that promised teens their future was going to be worse than a Medieval peasant’s, paved the way for several failed film series with similarly bleak premises. “The Walking Dead” series — which is sci-fi adjacent, but is a key instigator in what I’m describing — began to multiply like its titular zombies, spreading whether we wanted more misery porn or not. Even Blade Runner, one of the Hollywood OGs when it comes to dystopian futures, got a sequel…that predictably was also pretty damn bleak.
The future was still someplace to avoid.
Here’s my theory about why this happened, or at least a large part of why it happened.
By the time Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of the United States, the prosperity of the last two decades of the 20th century had slowed and then ground to a loud halt with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. As those entering the work force in the 00s began to realize their futures would almost certainly be worse than their parents’, cultural anxiety skyrocketed and optimism plummeted.
The reality of “hope and change” didn’t help. Obama didn’t investigate the crimes of his predecessor, he continued to prosecute unjust wars in increasingly murderous ways, he failed to act on climate change, billionaires, and the widening economic divide between the haves and have nots, he failed to pass universal health care, and...well, I’ll just stop there.
If Americans were left cynical by the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton being a sexual predator, and George W. Bush’s war crimes, Obama did not substantively improve matters. In fact, his two terms in the White House only calcified the power of the Far Right in Congress, making the U.S.’s current civil war – and make no mistake, it is that – inevitable.
What I am describing here is pervasive and expanding existential despair, plain and simple. Doom creep is another way I’ve referred to it. It was inevitable that science-fiction would have something to say about it, too. Hell, science-fiction storytellers are human, too. They need to try to make sense of our world just like everybody else. But once Hollywood got in on the action, optioning book after book, trying to create one franchise after another, some within the sci-fi community decided it was time to cash in. Give the big corporations with their big bank accounts what they want.
But let’s think about what happens when a generation raised on The Hunger Games – the first book of which was released smack-dab in the middle of the Global Financial Crisis – begins to consume a strict diet of despair in all forms of media. Two years later, “The Walking Dead” would premiere, delivering more of the same. “Black Mirror” (2011) wanted us to know technology was going to make everything worse. Christopher Nolan tried to answer this doom and gloom with Interstellar (2014), but of course the film imagines Earth dying, along with most of its population, before we get around to colonizing space. “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2017) eerily predicting America’s backslide when it came to women’s rights and, oh yeah, the rise of fascism in the country. Even Steven Spielberg got in on the action, adapting Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One in 2018.
I’m not going to run through all the titles, but there are a lot of them. A lot more were put into development in Hollywood and elsewhere around the globe, too.
Basically, pop-culture reimagined the future as a hellscape and very few storytellers imagined otherwise. Yes, you could fight. Yes, you could struggle. Yes, you might even win. But the outcome was always to somehow end up in control of an otherwise shitty world. Vision for what comes next was as rare in these stories as it is in the politics that took over the U.S. at the same time.
Survival became the nature of existence, as if we were all suddenly back in the Ethiopian Rift Valley, scrabbling to make it through just one more day utterly unaware of any future that might be different for us or our descendants.
This is where we find ourselves in 2025.
It’s important to note, I am not in any way blaming “science-fiction” or its storytellers, in whatever medium they create in, for any of this. But I am wondering if many amongst us – because I’ve written my share of sci-fi, too – unwittingly filled up our metaphorical gas cans and showed up like arsonists to whatever hope we had left. In trying to reflect our society’s existential anxiety about the future, did we accidentally encourage our audiences to embrace despair instead?
Despair is an alluring thing. I feel it all the time these days. But as journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “To despair is to abandon people,” and I cannot disagree with him. Not all art must be more than a mirror held up to our culture, but if the default setting is to perpetuate endless conflict, then of course we will become the worst parts of ourselves within this feedback loop.
There must also be the promise of more on the other side of struggle.
There must be a vision, something to aspire to, a dream to motivate that struggle.
Because if we lose sight of that, we give up, we stop expecting something more, and we turn to the past for answers. In the worst-case scenario, we turn on ourselves with destructive results. If you don’t believe me, turn on the news.
Society teeters on an unspeakable knife’s edge. It’s impossible not to feel as if we’re caught up in the great existential battle of our day – us versus them, us versus each other, us versus everybody. Of course, I’m using conflict language again. It reduces what’s happening to us to something to win or lose. Nowhere in that equation is what any of us are actually fighting for, which is the point of this essay.
Here's something the great science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, which I believe is worth considering:
“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”
Change is the point, not the conflict – nor is conflict the only way it can come about. But we must believe it’s possible first, or it becomes impossible.
One final quote here. It’s an observation about science-fiction from Dan Wang, a research fellow and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University - an observation I find quite inspirational as I write to you today.
“Science fiction is the most political genre. It’s fine that much of science fiction consists of critiques of contemporary society. It’s more interesting when it assumes a technological breakthrough or exaggerates a social trend to correctly predict an aspect of the future. It’s most useful when it can be used to spur hard work to build the future. Science fiction has the capacity to inspire by setting the vision of a radically better future, and by making it clear that the future won’t happen unless we put in the work.”
For too many years, we’ve only imagined that the future offers us dystopia and we, in turn, have worked to bring it about by conforming to our expectations of it. Maybe it’s time we put some work into imagining a version of all our tomorrows we actually want our grandchildren to grow up in. Because when I read and watch so much science-fiction today, I understand why the birthrate is crashing. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I read or watch the news.
I don’t know about you, but I want to dream about the future again. I don’t just want to survive it.
