strange machine contrib

[waider]

A Present Without A Future

(cue from Warren Ellis, here)

It used to be that the future was as close to us as finding another meal, but we had moved well past that point long ago. Knowing the future became an obsession for us. We invested millennia in trying to find out what was coming down the line next. We tried mysticism, we tried drugs, and then finally we tried pure, hard science. When we finally cracked it, everything became visible to us at once; the whole future, laid out as plainly as a hand in front of your face. And once we'd cracked it for ourselves, we'd cracked it for everyone. You can't tweak the space-time continuum this much without affecting the entire planet. Some people went insane almost immediately, others just shrugged it off and claimed it was no more than they expected. The shock seems to have tapered off now, along with the suicides and the screaming.

Now there's just an ever-present present, pushing all the next into now.

We've broken the future.

Comments

[tempest-mrc.livejournal.com]

I like that.

Especially the last two lines.

--MRC

[waider.livejournal.com]

Ta. The last line was actually the first thing that came to me.

[opts.livejournal.com]

Lovely concept.

[ggerrietts.livejournal.com]

I really liked the piece. It was imaginative and expressive and it carried me right along with it to the end.

Part of my response isn't so much about your writing though, as something that occurred to me as I read it. Much of science fiction, of futurism in general, leans heavily on the cult of science, suggests that science is in fact "the right answer" and yet it's equally common for science to devolve into mystical metaphysics when we talk about its deeper applications.

Let me run that through one more time for the sake of clarity. We hypothesize that science will break through, solve new problems. The way these problems are solved, their results, tend to resemble mystical events, metaphysical phenomenae. I think it's very apparent in this piece, but it's true of a lot of SF, from Asimov to Zelazny.

I bet there's a master's thesis in there somewhere.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Greg Egan has a lovely take on this whole idea in Distress where advances in understanding of the world affect more than just those who make (or understand) the advances. In general he's got some interesting ideas on how we interact with reality, and he's got enough science to make it more than just idle fantasy.

I'd disagree on the mystical nature of science, though. I think the close you get to, as Terence McKenna put it, "the wiring under the board", the harder it is to dumb it down into something that people who haven't dedicated their lives to studying it will understand. Thus, common wisdom has it that there are ten people in the world at any given time who actually understand Einstein's E=mc², and no one understands Quantum Physics, but the checks and balances provided by the introspective and self-questioning nature of scientific method has proven for the last century or so that they're (so far) correct. Science is the right answer, it's just that it doesn't always produce results that can be easily understood.