Adam Roberts on the future as imaginative territory

In a piece that is otherwise about Dickens's ghost stories, Adam Roberts writes:

The frame here is that the nineteenth-century saw a new kind of future-imagining. It’s Paul Alkon’s argument, advanced in The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (University of Georgia Press 1987) — that, basically, there was no such thing as a future-set fiction until the end of the eighteenth-century. He discusses a few, scattered earlier titles notionally set in the future, before expanding upon the success of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (‘The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One’ 1771) as the book that really instituted the mode of ‘futuristic fiction’ as such. Mercier’s book is a utopian reimagining of France set in the titular year, and it was in its day extremely popular. Indeed, its popularity led to a large number of imitators. Broadly: before Mercier utopias tended to be set today, but in some distant place; after Mercier utopias tended to be set in the future.

Through the early nineteenth-century loads of books were set in ‘the future’, many of them utopian works in exactly this Mercerian mode, such as Vladimir Odoyevsky’s The Year 4338 (1835) and Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836). But alongside this ‘new’ version of futuristic fiction was a vogue for a second kind of futuristic fiction, secularised (to some extent) versions of the old religious-apocalyptic future-imagining. The big hit in this idiom was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s prose-poem Le Dernier Homme (1805) — the whole of humanity bar one dies out, leaving Omegarus alone, to wander the earth solus, meditating upon mortality and finitude. Eventually Old Adam himself makes an appearance, and the novel ends with the graves giving up their dead and various other elements from St John’s revelation.

There were a great many of these ‘last man’ fictions, some reworkings of Grainville’s text, others ringing changes upon his theme — Auguste Creuzé de Lesser poeticised and expanded Grainville’s novel as Le Dernier Homme, poème imité de Grainville (1832), adding-in various materialist SFnalities (those flying cities and projects to explore other planets I mentioned). And husband-and-wife team Etienne-Paulin Gagne (L’Unitéide ou la Femme messie 1858) and Élise Gagne (Omégar ou le Dernier Homme 1859) reworked and expanded the Grainvillean original in respectively more spiritual and more materialised ways. In Britain, Byron’s striking and gloomy blank verse ‘Darkness’ (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) both engage the theme. Shelley’s novel is interesting, though pretty turgid it: a tale of political intrigue, war, a deadly pandemic set in AD 2100 that details the extinction of the entire human race, save only the titular ‘last man’, Lionel Verney, who wanders the depopulated landscapes and muses on nature, mortality and the universe.

We might style these two modes of imagining the future as spinning ‘positive’ (utopian) and ‘negative’ (apocalyptic) valences out of their futurism, but let’s not do that, actually. It would be clumsily over-simplistic of us. I’m more interested in the way the two modes feed into one another. Grainville’s novel ends with a more-or-less straight retelling of the Revelation of St John. Creuzé de Lesser’s poetic rewriting of Le Dernier Homme follows Grainville’s lead, but adds in a number of materialist and secular ‘futuristic’ details: a flying city, a plan to build craft and explore the solar system. Shelley’s Last Man jettisons the religious element altogether. We’re deep into the tradition that, through Verne and Wells and the US Pulps and Golden Age, broadens into science fictional futurism — a mode that remains, I suggest, broadly secularised but in ways that retain a significant, latent religious component.

Why does the Mercier-ist style of ‘futuristic fiction’ come so late? Why does it arrive, specifically, at the end of the 18th-century? Darko Suvin argues that it is to do with the American and French Revolutions — revolutionary thinking requires a secularised sense of a future that can be planned, and which improves on the present — as opposed to the apocalyptic sense of a future that wraps-up and ends this mortal world so common in the older religious traditions. Novels like Mercier’s map that secularised future fictively.

There may be something in this.

But it’s also worth noting that the futurism of L’An 2440 and Shelley’s Last Man is, qua futurism, pretty weak-beer. You can see from this frontispiece to a later edition of Mercier’s novel that France in the 25th-century is, in all respects save its more utopian social organisation, basically the France of the 18th-century.

Later:

But it is not until later in the nineteenth-century that secular future-fiction began styling its imagined worlds as, in multiple key ways, different to the world out of which they were written — differently furnished, technology-wise, its characters differently dressed, its social and personal weltanschauung differently construed. Perhaps the first book to do this was Edward Bellamy’s prodigiously successful Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the ‘bestselling American novel of the 19th-century’ stakes. The point here is that Bellamy takes an 1880s individual, ‘Julian West’, into his AD 2000 such that West’s contemporary preconceptions can be repeatedly startled by the technological and social-justice alterations that the future has effected. [...]

By the end of the century, most notably with the variegated futuristic fictions of H G Wells, the notion that the future would be in substantive ways different to the present had bedded itself into the emergent genre, such that it is — now — a core aspect of science fiction’s many futures. Nowadays ‘futuristic fiction’ simply comes with the sense, more or less axiomatically, that the future will be different to the present, not just in the old utopian-writing sense that a notional 1776, or 1789, will usher in a new form of social justice and harmony (according to whichever utopian crotchet or social-reform king-charles-head happens to be yours), but rather that change will happen across multiple fronts, have intricate and widespread ramifications. That the future will be a different country, and that they, that we, will do things differently there.

Still later:

For most of human history, that distinctive mental capacity we possess to project ourselves imaginatively into the to-come has been put at the service of a set of limited and particular things, a realm of possibility and planning conceived along, basically, one axis. The original futurists were the first farmers — a development from the timeless intensity of the hunt, in which humans no more have need for elaborate futurological skills than do lions and eagles, cats and dogs. Farmers, though, must plan. We cannot farm unless we know that the seasons will change and that we must plan for that change. We plan, though, on the basis that the future will be, essentially, the same as the past — that spring will follow winter, that next year will be basically like this year.

And still later, skipping most of the Dickens argument, we have:

What Dickens is saying (what Dickens is innovating) is the capacity of the future to haunt us in both a material and a spiritual sense — a new kind of futurity, captured here via the mode of the ghost story.

There's more at the link.

See this post from last year ago, When did the future become a site for human habitation like, say, crossing the ocean to colonize the New World? See also Tim Morton's notion of futurality ("...the possibility that things could be different") in, Reading Spacecraft 4: The future.