Part I: Time…the Final Frontier

Traveling backwards or forwards in time is something that I ran into long ago. And please don’t try to interpret that as a way that I’m “dating” myself. Language changes with time, but I’m still pretty hip about slinging the lingo. Or I was, or will be. It’s a little difficult when dealing with these time tenses. Where was I? Oh yeah, it all started when I read about that place in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where a gentleman by the name of Rip Van Winkle, took a nip of some special liquor and napped for 20 years, and woke up and found that a lot had changed.

Needless to say, that started me thinking about time-traveling, which then led me to the second such idea I encountered. This was my introduction to the idea of being inexplicably transported back in time, to some former era. I had in my possession, a “Complete Novels of Mark Twain” book collection, which included A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This book took right off on the subject, where in the very first page, a new set of terms were presented for my edification, i.e., transmigration of souls, transposition of epochs–and bodies.

Please note, my attitude was not just being curious about what might be possible if one could arrange circumstances such that time-travel could become possible, but also a desire to take advantage of the situation, much as Hank did back at King Arthur’s court. I wasn’t above doing some dreaming about how much fun it would be, to be the local equivalent of Merlin, just because of an avid background interest in science and chemistry. So I set about acquiring as much information as I could get about the subject of time travel.

Soon after then, a copy of H.G. Well’s Time Machine was in my hands, and I began to learn a lot more about the risks that were incurred when someone was traveling via a temporal transference technique. One thing was becoming apparent, and this was that time travel wasn’t a very safe thing to do. But I really got the jitters as I slowly realized how much more universal the implications could be. This became an outright fear about the inherent danger of the whole time travel topic, as I read about what could happen in A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. Fear of what could happen to Time, and to History. It was all so mysterious, and now also, quite a bit scary. Such a small thing could change so much. Which started to make even more sense when I heard about this same sort of thinking, expressed as another new concept.

It was called a paradox. The so-called universal paradox. The idea being that if someone were to travel back in time and somehow kill their ancestors, that someone would eliminate the possibility of his or her own existence in the present, and thereby not be able to perform the jump in time to begin with. This killed my previous goals of being able to travel back in time for a while, but it wasn’t long before I had time to learn about other newer ideas that added some depth and scope to the basis for time itself. By learning about this, I immediately gained even more perspective.

Part II: From Paradox to Hyperspace

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” -Albert Einstein

It seemed that others before me had thought through some of this, and they also had a few notions that went beyond the scientific validity of great thinkers like Galileo and Newton. Specifically, by this time I had already learned a bit about what Albert Einstein thought about time, in his general and special Theories of Relativity. Apparently, it was indeed possible to travel into the future, if you left behind your original reference point, and traveled away from there at speeds approaching the speed of light, in which case, time would slow down for you in a relative way. But the time back home would continue to advance at the original pace, and the left-behind world would grow older at a much faster rate than you would. And so, if you then returned back to your point of origin, everything would be much, much older than you now were. Thanks to Einstein, I had a model to go by. Time travel? Yes, sort of, but only in the forward direction. Time travel to the past just didn’t have a workable method like that. Or so I had been informed.

And although the consensus was that physical time travel to the past wasn’t possible, I wanted to know much more about the reasons why. That’s when I started getting into real serious research. I wanted to know if anyone had answers to questions like what is time? Or, is time even real at all? Surely, there had to be information about how everything began, or how it would all end. I even wanted to know about eternity. I was intent on seeking details that were a little more comprehensive than those that had been offered so far.

So by adding all of the above together, I arrived at the time in my life where I was learning about causality. At a point where space-time geometry, and the laws of physics all added up to certain things, which were supported by theories, which could then be speculated upon. But without knowing if the universe was causal or acausal, the answers still weren’t forthcoming. Was time travel only a myth? Or was it just a matter of time before we found out?

Science Fiction had some answers in the form of distortions of normal time and space, such as the prototypical “warp” or bending and folding of space-time. We had hyperspace and warp drives, and we also had Dr. Who, along with various other stories that were intentionally lending credibility to what might be possible if we were to employ what might be termed as higher dimensions. But there was one concept that begged for further examination by everyone who professed interest in the subject. This was known as a wormhole.

It seemed that Einstein’s ideas had been leading us in the direction of further explorations of the topology of our Universe. In the analogy used in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, I learned about how a three dimensional cube could be built into a four dimensional hypercube, also known as a tesseract. But that was very difficult to visualize at the time. It was much better to visualize this from the viewpoint of the wormhole. Was it going to be possible to open a tunnel that connects distant regions of space-time as though they were next door? Physicists thought about this in the way that a worm eats from one side of a curved apple to the opposite side. A tunnel through time. A wormhole that could allow travel to a different time. Into the past, or whenever.

Part III: We Were Just In Time

“…mere trifles like negative energy… should not deter any mathematical physicist worthy of his salt.” -Arthur C. Clarke

In the late 80s, I learned that a physicist at Caltech, Kip Thorne, along with several colleagues, had suggested that you could use a wormhole to time-travel into the past. Here’s how you would do it: Move one end of the wormhole through space, returning it to its original position, with the opposite end fixed in place. By jumping into the moving end, which ages less, you would connect back to an earlier time on the fixed end. When you come out of the fixed end an instant later, you’d emerge into your own past. All very workable in theory, except for one small problem. Keeping a wormhole open for more than a fraction of a second is extraordinarily difficult. So difficult that the only way to keep them open (in theory), is with matter that has a negative density, e.g. something that weighs less than nothing at all.

Although this mind-bending and wormhole-bending trick sounds impossible, there appears to be a way to create a region of negative density in between two plates of electrically conducting material, which was originally theorized about as a force by physicist Hendrik Casimir, then eventually named the Casimir effect. Having been verified in the laboratory, it appears to be able to support a microscopic wormhole for an arbitrarily long period of time. Long enough that a wormhole could act in the above described manner.

At this point in history, the questions about where the universe comes from, how and why it began, and will it come to an end, and if so, how, are mostly topics that remain in the realm of theoretical physics. The ongoing research has yet to conclusively bring us answers, but certain topics such as the nature of time, gravity, the Big Bang, black holes, and the search for the grand unifying theory (T.O.E.), are being discussed and thought about by more people than ever before, thanks to those authors who are so adept at non-technical jargon, such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Michio Kaku, to name a few of my personal favorites.

However, we may be right around the corner to discovering a whole new world of possibility. There are many questions, but also some possible answers for ways that a Time Machine could be built, and make it all too easy to travel through time. We won’t know until we get there I suppose, unless it already happened and we just don’t know about it yet.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” -Carl Sagan

Depending on how you look at it, perhaps some or even most of these books are the best-written stories of all time, or in fact, the best-selling Sci-Fi, Fantasy, or Horror stories ever.  They are not in any particular order,  because certain of these stories really made a strong impression on me growing up (e.g. Frank Herbert’s books), and yet I’ve listed them without regard to their popularity.

Some of these are older classics that our parents may have read too, and some are pretty new (the latest Harry Potter for instance). Due to my own interests, several of these are on my personal “most recommended books of all time” list and I’ve certainly read most of these over and over.

Some of them don’t exactly fit into a given genre, but a few of them are either currently about to be released as movie versions, or are already top-selling book and movie franchises.

And if high-quality literature is something that you care about, then I’m sure you’ll agree that all of these are capable of taking you to another microcosmic universe, world, or parallel dimension, where romantic and strange things are happening.  A place where the long, hot, summer time months will go by more enjoyably, as you wander through these stories with a sense of wonder.

1. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Series) by Douglas Adams (HUMOR, SCI-FI)
3. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (TIME TRAVEL)
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
6. The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien (EPIC FANTASY ADVENTURE)
7. The Princess Bride by William Goldman (FANTASY ROMANCE)
8. Twilight (Series) by Stephenie Meyer (VAMPIRES, ROMANCE)
9. Ender’s Game (Series) by Orson Scott Card (SCI FI)
10. Interview with the Vampire (Series) by Anne Rice (VAMPIRES)
11. The Stand by Stephen King (HORROR, POST-APOCALYPTIC)
12. Dune (Trilogy + Series + Prequels) by Frank Herbert (SCI FI)
13. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (FANTASY)
14. Dracula by Bram Stoker (THEE VAMPIRE)
15. Dead Until Dark (Series) by Charlaine Harris (VAMPIRES)
16. Outlander (Series) by Diana Gabaldon (TIME TRAVEL, ROMANCE)
17. The Shining by Stephen King (FANTASY, HORROR)
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (FANTASY – MAGICAL REALISM, ROMANCE)
19. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (FANTASY, SUPERHEROES, COMIC BOOKS)
20. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (FANTASY ADVENTURE)

This summer’s Red Mist is a new supernatural thriller film directed by Paddy Breathnach, starring Arielle Kebbel (The Grudge 2, The Uninvited), Andrew Lee Potts, Martin Compston (Doomsday), MyAnna Buring (The Decent) and Sarah Carter (Skinwalkers).

Red Mist a.k.a. Freakdog is the winner of eight international film awards, including Best New Director at San Sebastian, and a Special Award at American Independent Film Festival. Director Paddy Breathnach won critical acclaim and scored a scary success at the box-office with his previous film Shrooms.

The film’s Screenwriter, Spence Wright, sets the well-developed characters on their paths to destruction, with a series of mishaps that builds the tension in each scene, right up to the ultimate conflict and climax of horror.

The plot consists of a group of medical students who play a cruel prank on the hospital’s janitor, Kenneth, (Andrew Lee Potts) that sends him into a deep coma. Guilt-ridden Catherine (Arielle Kebbel) attempts to save Kenny’s life, by administering an untested experimental drug. Instead of curing him, it sends his brain waves spiking and triggers a powerful out-of-body experience. Kenny, using his newly enabled and sinister mental powers, takes revenge on those responsible for his condition. As her fellow med students are savagely killed off, Catherine is faced with the realization that what started out as a medical miracle, has now transformed Kenny into a brutal monster. She is forced to get confrontational with the comatose killer, as he moves in and out of bodies at will, growing ever more closer to defeating her as his supernatural powers increase.

Just as he did in Shrooms, box-office savvy Director Paddy Breathnach, delivers gut-wrenching fear by employing some unique camera work, editing techniques, and visual special effects, which combined with the great musical score, deliver a raw intensity to this movie that might just impress you in spite of it’s predictableness.

US audiences are more likely to catch the film coming out on DVD, since it is currently only being shown in theatres in the UK. Included in the DVD’s special features is “The Making of Red Mist,” an “Extended Interview with Arielle Kebbel,” and “The Red Mist Cast in Northern Ireland.”

RED MIST TRAILER

Robot Rats…

Robotics researchers are often inspired by biology, to explore the possibilities of endowing robots with life-like capabilities. Using models of behavior known as biomimetic (to mimic biological behaviors), robots can be programmed to be somewhat autonomous. However, because of the complexity of modeling human autonomous behaviors, developments in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, are still much less significant than the predictions of Science Fiction stories, and only the simplest of abilities have been achieved so far.

Due to the extensive obstacles in making robots that can do more than just make repetitive, pre-programmed gestures, scientists still continue to strive for designs that will allow robots to figure out how to “survive” in new environments. Without the amount of learning ability that can keep a robot from being helpless without human intervention, goals such as the robotic exploration of Mars, are still highly susceptible to failure.

One school of thought therefore, is to start with the simpler problem solving abilities of animals such as mice and rats, rather than attempting to replicate human intelligence, with its higher level of complexity, language and reasoning.

For example, robots have been designed to operate using many of the same kind of sensory organs as a rat, including a sensitive set of whiskers, two cameras for eyes, two microphones for ears, all of which is controlled by software that functions as a nervous system. The robot rat has the ability to mimic real rat behavior, by using the data supplied by those sensory inputs to build up a sort of mental map of complex environments.

Science Fiction fans will probably recognize some of the ideas of robotic rodents, in stories such as Ray Bradbury’s description of little cleaning mice, in The Martian Chronicles (1950):

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean. Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

and Greg Bear’s depiction of tiny robotic sensors that police could set loose in a crime scene to look for clues, in Queen of Angels  (1990):

A radio assayer hung from the track mounted in the apartment ceiling, having replaced the sniffer. Dustmice pushed through the cold stiff tendrils of once live carpet searching it for skin flakes and other debris trapped in the carpet’s custom digestion.

In yet another situation where real science mimics the ideas of speculative fiction, European researchers from France’s Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics, have created a Rat-shaped robot called Psikharpax. Named after the cunning king of the rats in a Greek story, Psikharpax is a next generation robot which is advancing the leading edge of artificial intelligence.

The unique abilities of this prototype for future robots allow it to process data from four inch whiskers known as vibrassae, as well as from other artificial organs intended to replicate the way that an organic rat’s brain relies on sensory input to navigate, find food and survive threats to it’s existence.

Psikharpax’s chip brain also incorporates a software hierarchy which is designed to be similar to the structures of a rat brain, allowing it to analyze and process what is being seen, heard and sensed. By being able to “perceive” the environment around it, and “learn” how to avoid threats, Psikharpax is demonstrating a level of biomimickry that can sustain it in the absence of human intervention.

A similar robot rat has been developed by a team of British scientists from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the University of Sheffield. The ‘SCRATCHbot’ robot is part of a project to develop biologically inspired artificial intelligence systems. It imitates the way that real ratsexplore their environments using their whiskers to accurately determine the position and shape of objects, make decisions about objects, and build environmental maps about their surroundings.

By intentionally emulating how the physical sense of touch is more important than vision, for biological creatures that live in nocturnal or poorly-lit conditions, this project suggests potential for a number of applications such as controlling robots in low-vision conditions, for navigating underwater or underground, or even smoke-filled environments where vision is compromised.

If robots are to be effective as interplanetary explorers, these abilities must be present. Thus, the improved results of this biologically inspired approach has potential benefits in the effort to produce robots that can be very helpful to human beings, in many different environments that would be difficult for humans to survive in.

As a young reader, the discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs is literally what propelled me head first into a life-long love of science and fantasy fiction. Burroughs is the American author whose best-known character is Tarzan, though his first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was a work of science fiction published in a magazine in 1910.

He went on to write a series of stories in the science fiction genre, about a version of Mars known as Barsoom. The Barsoom tales are the ultimate Extra-Terran Swashbuckling Romance Adventure novels of all time, and include A Princess of Mars (1917), The Gods of Mars (1918), The Warlord of Mars (1919), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1928), A Fighting Man of Mars (1931), Swords of Mars (1936), Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1948), and John Carter of Mars (1964).

Burroughs introduces these novels as though they were a factual account passed on to him personally. He portrays John Carter as an ageless figure known to his family for years, who gave him certain manuscripts during a mysterious visit, with instructions not to publish them for 21 years.

Burroughs describes Barsoom as a kind of Martian American Wild West, and John Carter as a kind of adventuring frontiersman. When John first arrives on Barsoom, he mistakes the landscape for the Arizona he has left behind. His story gives details of a savage, frontier world where the civilized Red Martians are kept invigorated as a race by repelling the constant attacks of the Green Martians, a possible equivalent of wild west ideals. The opening scene, narrated in the first person, sets the stage for what’s to come:

Excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 1 – On the Arizona Hills (from A Princess of Mars)

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.

The American copyright of the five earliest novels has expired in the United States. So these days, you can read the rest of that story and most of the other Barsoom stories listed above, at:  Literature.org

After nearly a century of popularity, and many spin-off works of fiction, a brand new adaptation of the Barsoom book series is coming from Disney in 2010. Directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and WALL-E),  starring Taylor Kitsch, (who is best known to movie-goers as Gambit in the Wolverine movie that just came out), as John Carter, and Lynn Collins, (who also co-stars with Kitsch in Wolverine, as Silverfox), as Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, this big-budget film promises to rekindle yet another round of interest in Burroughs’ Barsoom novels. I’m sincerely hoping that the movie that took so long to make, will be worth the wait.

Multiple generations of readers have made J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic story of Middle-earth one of the great successes of the fantasy genre. In fact, in 1999 in a poll of Amazon.com customers, his trilogy was judged to be their favorite “book of the millennium”. Last year, Tolkien was ranked sixth on the list of “50 Greatest British Writers” by The Times.

Considered to be the “father” of modern fantasy literature, his writings include a body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays. To this day, Tolkien’s published work has inspired, and continues to inspire, artwork, music, films, video games and theatrical adaptations, even the founding of societies by his enthusiastic fans.

Indeed, Middle-earth has had such an enormous effect on the entire field of modern fantasy fiction, that to be “Tolkienian” or “Tolkienesque” has become a reference in popular culture equivalent to “Arthurian”. Interest in his enormously popular fictional creations, has generated a literary discipline known as Tolkein Studies, which focuses on what Tolkien fandom often refers to as Tolkien’s Legendarium.

Among many outstanding characters from the The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), one of the most important supporting characters in the final parts of the trilogy is that of Gollum. Originally known as Sméagol, the character is named Gollum after his habit of making “a horrible swallowing noise in his throat”.

Gollum was the previous owner of the Ring, before Bilbo found it and carried it away to the Shire, where it ended up in the possession of Frodo. Right up to the end of the story, Gollum’s interactions are a constant source of trouble, in the form of “tricksy” deceits that almost defeat the purpose of Frodo’s quest, which is to destroy the Ring and defeat Sauron.

Last month was the online debut of The Hunt For Gollum by writer/director/producer Chris Bouchard. This new 40 minute indie fan film, which was inspired by the appendices from the classic Ring trilogy, was made for less than $5,000, and is available online for free. The production values are better than expected, so this short flick should be a pleasant surprise for LOTR fans, who will appreciate the creativity that went into it. I’m giving it my thumbs up, but check it out yourself on www.thehuntforgollum.com or http://www.dailymotion.com/HuntforGollum and tell us what you think.

The best-selling science fiction novel in history, is the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965). It is also noted as the first major ecological science fiction novel, because the story contains many descriptions of the life that inhabits the desert planet Arrakis, in a complex and unique dry-land ecology that includes giant sandworms and the Fremen. Dune explores the interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, and had a great influence on the environmental movement in the years immediately after it was first published.

Among the multitude of sweeping, inter-related themes and multiple character viewpoints, there are continuous reminders for the reader, of how moisture is very precious to the people who live there. The struggle to survive forces the Fremen to rely on highly efficient means to conserve, reuse, and in general, capture every drop of available water in order to sustain life.

Their use of body-enclosing garments known as Stillsuits, allows them to maintain and reclaim their body moisture in the harsh environment. They also utilize another way to get water, which is a device known as a windtrap, that precipitates moisture from the air. Windtraps have been used here on Earth by the desert dwellers of the Middle East for thousands of years, so Herbert was basing his creative invention on a known technology that works because of how moisture in the air condenses in the cool nighttime temperatures, and can be collected. You are also likely to have heard of a solar still, which works on the same principles.

Recently,  scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology, have found a way of collecting drinking water from air humidity, using an automated process that could be sustained through thermal solar collectors and photovoltaic cells, so that it would be able to run with no external power source.

The process uses a brine solution which would absorb moisture from the air as it runs down a tower-shaped structure. At the bottom of the tower, the hygroscopic (moisture laden) saline would be sucked into a tank that contains a de-pressurized vacuum, where the boiling point of liquid is lower than it would be under normal atmospheric pressure. This effect is present at high altitude in the mountains, where water boils at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius.

When the solution boils, it would evaporate as non-saline water, and then be condensed back into a volume controlled tube, which would continue to produce the vacuum because of the gravity of the water column in the tube. This is also why no vacuum pump would be needed. The end of the cycle would occur when the reconcentrated brine runs back down the tower again, absorbing moisture from the air. The concept could be built as single person units, or as larger water producing installations which could supply an entire hotel. Prototypes of the major system components, including air moisture absorption and vacuum evaporation, have already been tested in the laboratory. The next step will be to build an actual facility, which will demonstrate proof of the concept.

Here’s some good news for all of us Horror fans. Master of suspense and horror fiction author Dean Koontz, is releasing his newest novel “Relentless” (Bantam Books) today (June 9). You can get a sneak preview of the thriller here, or explore his previously published books (listed here).

Relentless offers plenty of Koontz’s special brand of dark terror and even some sci-fi mixed into a plot that introduces us to Cullen “Cubby” Greenwich, a bestselling novelist who runs into problems when he confronts an influential book critic who gives his new book a bad review. Cubby and his family barely stay one step ahead of the threatening book critic Shearman Waxx, as he tracks his intended victims down with intent to kill.

Koontz’s latest novel, adds to a list of over a hundred, including ten hardcovers and thirteen paperbacks that have reached #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. As of 2008, his success has listed him as the sixth highest-paid author, in a tie with John Grisham. Often featuring fantastical plot elements, Koontz’s stories also offer plausible, logically consistent science-based explanations for the bizarre events depicted. Although very few of Koontz’s novels are purely supernatural, he tends to use strange and quirky themes that idealize how love and compassion can save his characters from the apparent absurdities of existence and the cruelties of life.

His fans seem to favor the novel Watchers, and the Odd Thomas Series, but his most recent work extends to graphic novels and comic projects like Frankenstein and Nevermore, and are likely to increase the scope of his already substantial fan base. You can sign up for his newsletter, and get the latest updates from his official website.

We’ll also be looking forward to the July release of Frankenstein 3, which is Koontz’s retold version of Mary Shelley’s classic story, featuring an adaptation by legendary comic book writer Chuck Dixon and gorgeous illustrations by acclaimed artist Brett Booth. It’s sure to be a hot and horrible summer, if Dean Koontz has anything to say about it.

Back in the Renaissance, the Italians used a term, “terriblisma,” to describe the strange mixture of fear and excitement they felt when they were observing catastrophes that were on the scale of all so-called act of God disasters. Apparently, our modern culture has a more contemporary version of this emotionally complex sense of fascination with all things Dystopic.

Science fiction uses the popular subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction, to portray scenarios of doom which imply what kind of struggles humanity might face in the smoking aftermath of nuclear hellfire or hurtling asteroids, or what might be encountered admidst the ruins of civilization after epidemics, mass starvation, or alien invasion.

From among the very first science fiction novels, have come the classic dystopian themes and stories that disturbed us with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic visions. Very early examples of such stories include The Last Man (Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, 1805), After London (Richard Jeffries, 1885), Caesar’s Column (Ignatius Donnelly, 1890), The Machine Stops (E.M. Forster, 1909), The Night Land (William Hope Hodgeson, 1912), Rossum’s Universal Robots (Karel Čapek, 1921), and some lesser known works by fairly well known authors, such as The Last Man (Mary Shelley, 1826), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London, 1912), and Anthem (Ayn Rand, 1938).

Much of these works were influential to some degree, whether they were an influence to later authors or set the stage for the wider subject matter of the science fiction genre in general. Certain stories from this era are considered to be true classics of the genre, and some of the best of these were The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895), War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1898), The Shape of Things to Come (H.G. Wells, 1933), Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1930), When Worlds Collide (Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, 1933), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949).

In the same vein, science fiction that considers what possible effects there would be if global cataclysm occurred, were a main theme in much of the second half of the twentieth century. These include best-sellers and award winners like Lucifer’s Hammer (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle), On The Beach (Nevil Shute), Earth Abides (George R. Stewart), A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.), The Postman (David Brin), Eternity Road (Jack McDevitt), The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson), I Am Legend (Richard Matheson), and Planet Of The Apes (Pierre Boulle). The continuing popularity of this type of literature has supported new versions and retelling of many of these stories, which have been made into films and TV shows.

We all have fears that something really bad is going to happen if we don’t do something about it, so we seem to use science fiction to see a window into the devastated future, then hope to enjoy the prospects of being smart enough as a life form, to survive these implied threats. The thing that gets me about post-Apocalyptic/dystopian future novels is that they all seem rather depressing and hopeless, at least on the surface. But if we dig deep down and delve around in our fears, we come to understand that in a world beset by some of the most frightening problems that we’ve ever had to deal with, from economic turmoil and the loss of privacy, to the extremes of climate change and ecocatastrophe, and the awful implications of things like terrorism, war, or the loss of free will due to thought control, we really have a need for our phoenix to rise from the ashes and to bring back hope to a world on the brink of darkness. Here’s hoping that, Omega themes in our culture notwithstanding, we will come away from all of this, and evolve to a dreamed of destiny as a form of intelligent life that eschews Dystopia.

I write this with the same optimism that is evinced by Arthur C. Clarke in this 1983 quote:
“At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved – if it can be achieved at all – within the next few hundred years.”

In this day and age, it’s not hard to find those who are excited by, and devoted to technology enough to find in it something more than a mere matter of idle amusement.  I mean, I think we can agree at this point, that technology of all sorts, has had an important influence on our lives. There is also a great deal of significance to all forms of technology, beyond the influence felt.

In my professional career as a computer consultant, when talking to computer users about technology in general, I have on many occasions advanced arguments for supposing such significance to exist. Most will readily agree that we are experiencing a great deal of change because of this, but not everyone sees the implications clearly enough.

Our lives as human beings have always been subject to drastic and more or less irreversible change, usually in the form of advances in science and/or technology. Because of this, life is forever changed from those significant advances like the invention of fire, or the wheel, or agriculture, or metallurgy, or printing. These great changes all had world-shaking consequences, which have added up to the total of everything that we now have or know about.

We have also come to comprehend that the rate of change is continuously increasing, and that as these changes are introduced, they tend to increase the security of the human species, which in turn increases our population numbers. With increased population comes additional amounts of those who are capable of conceiving, inventing and developing more new advances in science and technology. In addition, these advances act as catalysts for further advances, so that the resulting effect is cumulative.

In our current era, the rate of change itself is so rapid that in the course of a single lifetime, entire new vistas of technology unfold in front of our amazed perception. This has placed a strain on what people and our society as a whole, are able to adapt to enough, at a rapid enough pace, to avoid a constant feeling of being overwhelmed. Since we humans tend to like things as they are (most of the time), we feel that there should be no change, and we resist for certain reasons.

I get a sense that many people are intimidated to the point of being in a sort of panic, over whether or not they can plan effectively for what is coming. It is certainly true now, that our plans are outdated as fast as we can think of them and begin to attempt implementing anything. By the time that we recognize problems, action is already overdue, and if not taken at once, will arrive too late because the original problem has mutated already, and is growing more and more out of control.

Now that we humans, in the course of our scientific and technological advances, have made matters worse by building devices that have the power to destroy civilization as we know it (if the power is abused), we are at that stage where we must advance to as yet unheard of heights (if we learn how to manage such power), or die trying.

With the stakes so high, and because we are in such a terrifying situation, we must come to understand what needs to be done.

There is a necessity for us to anticipate what we might be about to encounter, with a certain degree of accuracy. When we make our plans, we will need to take into account not just what we now know exists, but also what is likely to exist in the future, from next year, and the year after that, to ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Whenever and at whatever place the solution for a problem might actually come into existence and take effect.

If we are to take into account the changes that are certain to happen, we cannot continue to resist or even refuse to allow the changes to take place. If we don’t plan for what is to come, we are showing by our actions that we are just wishing that life could be magically restored back to some imaginary bygone perfection, where the resources were limitless, and we had a perceived safety from threats. But this isn’t reality, and we should not be living in denial about who will care about what we have set in motion for future generations to be forced to live with. We will all care, someday soon enough.

This is where technology, based on scientific research and advanced knowledge, will come to the rescue. Sure, our advances in technology brought about the age of industrialism, and it is that technology which has saturated our world with pollutants, toxic chemicals, and waste that will have a half life of tens of thousands of years.

These same advances in technology within our lifetimes, have forced us into a frantic need to escape from the realty that we are being faced with in our immediate future. But when we accept the use of technology into our lives, we are also accepting the need for change. Change is necessary, and inevitable, so we need to assume that new forms of technology, will assure that we can keep this island of life up and running for a long time to come.

Will this mean that our social and physical contexts can continue without any changes? Not likely, since we are close to running out of room on a number of issues that are no longer open to debate. Our energy sources, and the ability to feed all of the hungry people of this world, are in danger of over-extension. Nature herself, has tipped past the point of self-correction, unless we are assuming that the human species is meaningless in the larger context of what this planet endures.

If we speculate about the possibilities of expansion (such as colonization of the planets, moon, and lesser bodies of our solar system), we will need to survive many things in the process of getting to the point where this would even be possible. It is becoming more and more clear that what we do here in the present, will end up determining many of the remaining possibilities of what our next few generations will have the ability to survive, with any real chance of coherency or structure.

The value and importance of technology is that we will continue to invent new things as we grow and evolve our culture and our viewpoint. We can learn to co-exist, essentially without national boundries, by utilizing the nature of the internet, the world-wide-web, and the next phase of wireless communication, to open the doors of freedom. We will survive, because of our ability to rely on each other as a planet full of people, who use these newest forms of communication to share with all other humans, our dreams and hopes for what is to come if we work together to change and improve the world.

In my next post, we’ll take a look at some works of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction which portray what happens when things don’t go so well, when pandemics, severe natural disasters, the fall of civilization, the end of the world (“dying earth”) and massive wars are in conflict with the continuing survival of the human race. Terrifying indeed.