Readings Report

Tom Hagen

Nicole Miller

Art 350S

12 February 2017

Written Report of Readings

            One genre of fiction that continues to bring that childlike spark into a human’s eye is science fiction, which very much enables us to take a peek into the future and attempt to determine what will become of our society with the coming of new technology. Take, for instance, the most popular sub-genres of science fiction: Apocalyptic and Utopian. In one genre, due to the error of human ways we end up with a world that should be uninhabitable, with the ruins of human civilization dotting the landscape and in some cases, nature taking over where possible. The other scenario, which I always compare to the movie Tomorrowland, is a society that has essentially skyrocketed in its technological progress to the point that people’s lifespans are essentially indefinite, all diseases are cured instantaneously, and there is complete balance between innovation, invention, and environment. However, the three readings given to us illustrate three distinct and somewhat similar “futures” for society.

            In EM Forster’s “The Machine Stops” we have a future where nearly every aspect of human life is controlled by our various inventions. This piece when I began reading it really made me think of the movie WALL-E, where humans are confining themselves to autonomous chairs that handle every aspect of our lives. I would say this fictional future is ideal, however with increased dependence on machinery we lose vital skills that help define us as human beings, and we truly begin to lose who we are. This society to me is one I would refer to as an Automatic Dystopia, as we aren’t truly human beings but we are reliant on the preprogrammed notions of the various mechanical devices we have constructed to fulfill basic tasks.

            With “This Changes Everything,” an article written by Naomi Klein, we see a potential future that is essentially a devastated environment. Catastrophic rising in the average temperature melts the icecaps, and then most plant life goes extinct whilst humans are forced to flee inland to avoid the horrid rising sea levels. Not exactly the kind of future you hope for, but definitely a very real possibility in our modern age. In essence, this future could be attributed to a wide variety of causes, but one that I find particularly amusing is that to the planet, it sees the advancement of humanity and the growth of humankind as a sort of virus, so it is reacting much in the same way that our bodies react to a cold or flu. The planet is merely attempting to purge and wipe out this virus that threatens its existence, and to me I find that remarkable. This future that is foreseen is considered post-apocalyptic, though it is not the common nuclear war genre but merely environmental collapse.

            The Final piece of reading was called “50 years from now, what will the world be like?” This piece to me was more superficial than any others that we read, with it being more speculative than grounded in its own timeline. Most pieces of science fiction have a set timeline for themselves that explain the “current events” taking place and they tend to stick to it, whereas this one postulates multiple futures that all have different outcomes. I found it to be the weakest piece that we read, as speculation is often misleading when it comes to the truth.

            Overall, I found these readings to be rather fascinating but at the same time somewhat boring. They don’t really break out of the box on what the future could be. Most of them could technically fall under the film WALL-E, which really diminishes the impact of the stories overall. Any future worth imagining is one worth writing about, and these stories lack that spark that science fiction tends to produce.