http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202211.html
Fasten Your Seatbelts We could be headed for a great adventure. Or apocalypse. Either way, we're in for a wild ride. By Annalee Newitz Sunday, January 4, 2009; Page B01 When the present promises only economic hardship and political upheaval, what does the future look like? In 2009, it looks like a world of gleaming spaceships filled with enlightened people who have emerged with their humanity intact after a terrible war. They have entered the 23rd century, shed racism, no longer use money, possess seemingly magical technologies and are devoted to peaceful exploration. I refer of course to "Star Trek" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Star+Trek?tid=informline ] and its powerful story of a better tomorrow, which has been mesmerizing audiences for almost half a century and returns to movie theaters this coming May with an eagerly anticipated 11th full-length feature. But wait. The future also looks like this: a dark, violent world where a horrific war between humans and cyborgs leads to the near-extermination of humanity. This vision, in the latest "Terminator" movie, is also arriving at your nearest mutiplex in May. We imagine the future in places other than the movie theater, of course. Still, these two familiar franchises underscore the conflicting stories we tell ourselves in uncertain times about what lies ahead: Either we're bound for a techno-utopia of adventure, or a grim, Orwellian dystopia where humanity is on the brink of implosion. We've seen this dichotomy before. Nearly a century ago, Europe was headed toward war on an unprecedented scale. Traditional alliances evaporated, shocking new weapons ripped apart bodies and countries, and a generation of artists such as Picasso [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Pablo+Picasso?tid=informline ] responded with paintings that showed reality reduced to unsettling, jagged abstraction. Meanwhile, a pulp writer from Chicago named Edgar Rice Burroughs was concocting stories about a soldier who wakes up one morning in a miraculous, futuristic world full of lost cities, advanced technologies and little green men. "A Princess of Mars," serialized in 1912, was the first in a long line of swashbuckling adventure tales Burroughs wrote about his hero, John Carter [http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/c001051], sword-fighting and ray-gunning his way across Barsoom -- the natives' name for Mars. Carter and his new Barsoomian companions fought wars like the one the United States itself would soon be fighting. But they were winnable wars, against comprehensible, easy-to-vanquish alien enemies. Burroughs, who also went on to publish the Tarzan novels, supplied escapist fantasies of the future to a public weary of the grim, terrifying present. It's clear that hard times make audiences yearn for fantastical tales of a better tomorrow. During the paranoid heights of the Cold War, they thronged movie theaters to see Leslie Nielsen [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Leslie+Nielsen?tid=informline] conquer the alien technology of "Forbidden Planet." But in between the escapist fantasies of tomorrow, audiences also tuned in to grim tales of techno-fascist futures such as "Brave New World" and "1984." The best example of our polarized dreams of tomorrow came during the Great Depression. During this period, Americans couldn't get enough of Buck Rogers, a 20th-century soldier who falls into a coma and miraculously awakes in the 25th century. The story of his adventures, originally published as two novellas, became a long-running radio and movie serial and a newspaper comic strip that ran through most of the 1930s. Like John Carter on Barsoom, Buck and his comrades are fighting a war -- in this case, against the Mongols. But war isn't hell; it's a backdrop for awesome adventures and astonishing inventions. Later, the Flash Gordon comics and radio show competed with Buck Rogers for audiences craving escapism. Flash found himself on the Barsoom-esque planet Mongo, fighting the "Han" and swashbuckling his way through weird places filled with strange natives and sexy queens. But while Buck and Flash crossed swords on the radio, a very different idea of the future was being prophesied by British writer Aldous Huxley, who published "Brave New World" in 1932. The novel takes place in a 26th century where strife has been eliminated by means of state-controlled eugenics, mental conditioning, drugs and various technological niceties. Like a Buck Rogers in reverse, our hero Bernard finds himself alienated from the urban world of perfect plenty and promiscuity and repulsed by the "savage reservations" where unmodified humans live. In "Brave New World," Buck's shiny future is revealed as an insidious, high-tech fascism. The basic question raised by Buck Rogers and "Brave New World" is whether humans would be more prosperous in the far future than in the 1930s. The answer? Humans in both tales live in worlds of seemingly unlimited wealth. Whether that represents an improvement is a matter of debate. In the post-World War II period, it seemed as if the wealthier future had arrived, at least for many in America. A more bountiful tomorrow was no longer a source of moral ambiguity, especially in Robert Heinlein's wildly popular young adult novels of the 1940s and '50s, including "Space Cadet," "The Rolling Stones" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Rolling+Stones?tid=informline] and "Have Space Suit -- Will Travel." In these stories, nice kids and adventurous families, blessed with a seemingly endless supply of rocket ships and fuel, romp through the sprawling offworld colonies of the solar system. Films such as "Forbidden Planet" splashed this vision of the future across hundreds of movie screens. A heroic space captain (played by an earnest Leslie Nielsen) leads his intrepid crew to a planet where a lone scientist and his nubile daughter bask in a world of endless riches. But the astronauts are menaced by an amorphous, deadly creature which, it turns out, is created by powerful alien technology, buried beneath the planet's surface, that "manifests" aspects of the scientist's "unconscious mind" -- savage, invisible monsters that strive to protect his daughter from the Nielsen character's advances. In these futures of plenty, the one problem that dogs our heroes again and again is the power of technology. In the best-case scenarios, deadly technologies are easily defeated or are put in the hands of right-thinking people who won't abuse them. Will the high-tech fruits of the Cold War quest for knowledge destroy us? These stories say no. But darker views from the Cold War offer authoritarian futures where technology wipes humans out entirely (as in the nuclear wasteland of "On the Beach") or is used to brainwash populations into submission. Televisions are among the most insidious technologies depicted in Cold War dystopias. The book-burning masses in Ray Bradbury's [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Ray+Bradbury?tid=informline] "Fahrenheit 451," first published in 1953, are addicted to interactive, wall-size TVs. And in Orwell's "1984," published in 1949, the population is both pacified and monitored by the omnipresent telescreens in every home and workplace. While Orwell and Bradbury were writing, the menace of the near future came from atomics. But the threat of the far future seemed to emanate from a technology that destroyed populations by controlling their minds rather than blasting apart their atoms. The first wave of the Cold War was temporarily stilled in the wake of the political and social upheavals of the 1960s. While previous generations had worried about future prosperity and scientific progress, far-future stories of this new era asked a single stark question: In a world of scarce resources and constant war, would Homo sapiens survive at all? Partial answers came in movies such as "Soylent Green," in which overpopulation and food shortages have forced the world into cannibalism. And the far future series "Planet of the Apes" depicts humans as the new wild animals in a world ruled by hyper-intelligent simians. These films, and many others like them, blamed humanity's demise on its abuse of nature. But this era also marked the beginning of the utopian Star Trek franchise, which spawned spinoffs, movies, comics, conventions, subcultures, costume contests and books that are still ragingly popular today. Like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Star Trek has its easy-to-understand enemies, the alien Klingons and the Romulans. But wars against them don't undermine the basic message of the story, which is that humanity has evolved into something better. Of course, this year Star Trek will do battle at the box office with Terminator's human-destroying cyborg carnage. Though their visions of the future are dramatically different, both movies share one basic premise: Despite hardship, humanity will survive. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen. anna...@io9.com Annalee Newitz is the author of "Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture," and editor of the science fiction blog io9.com
