TOMORROW'S WORLDS: TIME TRAP

What if we could tamper with time?

That’s the question uppermost in the mind of Dominic Sandbrook (aka Sandy), in the fourth and final instalment of his BBC documentary series, Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction. The programme was a predictable but nonetheless enjoyable romp through some of SF’s more familiar time travel tales.

Sandy begins, of course, with the HG Wells classic, The Time Machine. Ignoring the novel’s origin in the short story, The Chronic Argonauts, written in 1888, Sandy suggests that time travel begins in 1895 with Wells’ novel.  Curiously, he characterises The Time Machine as an attempt to explore the discovery of spiritualism, and the frontiers beyond.  I found this one of the strangest assertions in all of Sandy’s four programmes.

On the contrary, The Time Machine has two major themes: evolution and social class.  The book is an ingenious voyage of discovery through the invention of a machine, which symbolises the power of science and reason. The Time Traveller sets out to navigate and dominate time. His discovery? Time is lord of all. The significance of the story’s title becomes clear. Man is trapped by the mechanism of time, and bound by a history that leads to his inevitable extinction.

It’s not surprising that Wells had these twin obsessions of evolution and class.

Firstly, Wells had emerged from an English lower middle class, that had previously spawned only one other key author – Charles Dickens. Wells’ mother had been in service, his father a gardener. Though they were hopeful of elevating their status on becoming shopkeepers, the shop failed, year after year. Wells’ own employment began as a draper's apprentice. It ended rather abruptly when he was told he was not refined enough to be a draper. Such rejection at the sharp end of a class-conscious Victorian England became the motivation for Wells’ critique of the world. Secondly, Wells’ scientific watershed had come on meeting Darwin’s Bulldog at the Normal School of Science, later the Royal College of Science, whilst studying evolutionary biology under the great TH Huxley.

With Huxley as his inspiration, Wells began as an author, living in the dark, lanterned, black macadam streets of Victorian London, engine-room of the British Empire. The first of Wells’ seminal novels, The Time Machine, plotted a dark future for Man. The book was a sceptical view of the devilish enginery of progress and imperialism.  It was an instant triumph.

In Wells’ book, the Traveller’s headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire voyage through the evolved worlds of man shows little spatial shift.  The terror of each age unravels in the vicinity of the Traveller’s laboratory. “It is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should interest us”, Wells had written in his essay, The Man of the Year Million. In The Time Machine we have Wells’ answer - a vision calculated to “run counter to the placid assumption … that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind”.

Time’s arrow thrusts the story forward to the year 802701 AD. The Traveller meets the Eloi, a race of effete, androgynous and child-like humans living an apparently pastoral life. Man’s conquest of nature, it seems, has led to decadence.  On discovering the subterranean machine world of the albino, ape-like Morlocks, a new theory emerges.  Over time, the gulf between the classes has produced separate species

So, rather than Sandy’s assertion that the novel was about spiritualism (a notion he contradicts later in the same programme), Wells foresaw a bifocal future. One image in the lens, “upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness”, focuses on what man may become when natural selection is eradicated, as with the Eloi.  The lens of the Morlock future, “the under-world [of] mere mechanical industry” arises when industrialisation serves as a chronic condition for natural selection. Wells’ warning is all the more powerful for making the reader feel responsible. It is the inequity of contemporary class society that leads to such monstrous futures. And the condition is still, of course, relevant today.

Perhaps Sandy’s greatest omission in this programme was the science fictional obsession with alternate histories. They were hardly mentioned. He did, however, comment on the use of time travel as a vehicle for sharp social criticism. Perhaps this is why Sandy left out alternate histories, as even a cursory examination of this sub-genre finds a very conservative tradition indeed.

Invariably, the alternate history and counter-factual stories tend to portray a dystopian world so much worse than ours that, as with Orwell’s flawed masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, the unrelieved portrayal of misery tends to reinforce passivity, rather than undermine it. They leave the reader resigned to believing, like Voltaire, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And we don’t.

TOMORROW'S WORLDS: US ROBOTS

Side step three. Peter Grehan, currently writing a Doctor Who related book for Candy Jar Books, reviews the third edition of BBC 2's Tomorrow’s Worlds – a programme about the history of sci-fi. 

I suppose it was a fortuitous coincidence for Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction that Prof Stephen Hawking stated last week that, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." It was fortuitous because the subject of Saturday’s edition of this four part series being discussed by Dominic Sandbrook was robots; or rather robots, androids, intelligent computers and cyborgs. All of these could be described as various forms of artificial beings. Given the complexity of the subject he did a pretty could job of summarising their history within science fiction given the limitations of a sixty minute TV programme. 

To do so though he had to restrict himself to probably the best known theme of robots and other artificial beings and that is their tendency to turn against us. Dominic uses as his starting point Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – or the Modern Prometheus published in 1818, but it is the Boris Karloff version of the creature that he suggests is the justification for classifying it as robotic. As he says, “His jerky, lumbering movements and the electrodes in his neck suggest something far more mechanical.” I would suggest that a biological robot is still a robot, it doesn’t need to be mechanical, especially since the origin of the word “robot” comes, as he says, from Karel Capek’s 1921 play, R.U.R. – Rossum's Universal Robots. These were manufactured biological robots created as a cheap labour force for the many factories around the world. The fact was they were slaves and manufactured not to care, at least not at first, because later their creators began to make them too clever. Dominic suggests that the play reflected the growing mistrust of automation and mechanisation in factories, but I would suggest that, so soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the play reflected more the ruling classes’ anxiety of an increasingly better educated proletariat deciding to exercise their power against them.

This is perhaps the greatest omission from the episode, the important metaphorical role that artificial beings perform in science fiction. They will often represent the hubris of the scientist, and his unwillingness to accept his responsibilities as in the case of Frankenstein, which is just as relevant to the scientists developing nuclear weapons during the Second World War or the scientists working today to exploit the environment and ignoring the damage it does to the ecology. Or they could refer to some social or political tension, as in the case of RUR perhaps something that becomes increasingly relevant once more with the increase in pro-capitalist economic liberalism being advocated in modern Western governments. They may also be used to explore the tensions of race relations in the U.S. as was the case in Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg, published in 1970, but still relevant today. In the case of Isaac Asimov’s Robots they represented science and technology as a force for good, something that would benefit mankind and progress him to a brighter, better future. 

These were the science fiction stories of the Golden Age, an age of optimism before the cynicism of the post nuclear age. Asimov’s robots and their three Laws became a template for the good robot, like Robbie from Forbidden Planet.

There is another role that the robot has, touched on by Dominic, and that is their ludic quality. It can take the familiar and add another dimension that is fresh and interesting. It is the comic relationship between Laurel and Hardy that is transferred to CP3O and R2D2 and refreshed in the Star Wars movies of George Lucas. As he says, “I think the audience were surprised by the relationship between R2-D2 and C-3PO” In a similar way the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie are given a new twist, when the murderer is an Asimov robot in Doctor Who:The Robots of Death.

But from Star Wars we are jolted back down to Earth with the Cyborg killers from Terminator, essentially killer robots that wear an exterior of human skin as a camouflage to allow them to blend into human society and seek and destroy their targets. It also brings us back to the Stephen Hawking quote about the dangers of creating machine intelligence. The stimulus for Terminator was the ‘Star Wars’ defence program, more correctly referred to as Strategic Defense Initiative and inspiration for Skynet, the A.I. computer designed to control the USA’s nuclear arsenal in the film that breaks free from its programming and merges with its Soviet counterpart. Having done so Skynet decides that human beings are just too dangerous to be allowed to exist any longer and it uses the weapons it has been placed in charge of to do so. The moral of the story is clear, design something to kill people and then make it intelligent, it will probably do what it was designed to do. Foolish, foolish humans.

Another thing robots do is reflect us so that we can ask, what makes us human? If they look like us and talk like us and think like us, in the way that the Cylons do in Battlestar Galactica and Replicants do in Blade Runner at what point can we say they are not human? And what if we take a human body and increasingly replace parts of it with synthetic equivalents, at what point does it cease to be human? In the most extreme case, the Cybermen, it seems the point has been well passed, but it is their missing emotions that are the important component, rather than their missing organs and limbs. 

It is the mental, not the physical that really matters as both Robocop and Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange illustrate. It is drugs and brainwashing that removes the humanity from the physically intact, if sociopathic, Alex and maybe that’s what we should be more wary off than thinking technology? 

TOMORROW'S WORLDS: WAR OF THE WORLDS

Another side step. Mark Brake, the author of Mark Brake’s Space, Time, Machine, Monster (featuring sections on Doctor Who) reviews the second edition of BBC 2's Tomorrow’s Worlds – a programme about the history of sci-fi. 

The greatest alien invasion in history began on bicycle.

HG Wells planned The War of the Worlds as he,“wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians”, as early as 1896.  It’s intriguing to picture him mapping mayhem as he declared his intentions to,“completely destroy Woking – killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways – then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of particular atrocity”,(indeed, it’s South Kensington that is haunted by the sound of the Martians howling,“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla”in Wells’ finished story).

It’s the exquisite violence of Wells’ imagination that marks his genius. And it’s this delicious balance between the suburban and the alien that is the focus of the second episode of Dominic Sandbrook’s Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction.Sandy, as viewers have come to affectionately know him, almost adopts a space/time/machine/monster structure to this series, but instead of ‘monster’, and as an historian whose expertise includes the Cold War (he’s written a biography on McCarthy), he’s sticking to what he knows most about - invasion paranoia!

Sandy opens this second programme with War of the Worlds, the key Victorian sci-fi work he conveniently skipped in episode one, as it would have ruined his thesis.  He correctly identifies War of the Worlds as the most enduring alien invasion myth of the 20th century.  Wells’ story was essentially copied many times, and adapted directly by Orson Welles in his famous radio broadcast in 1938, when broadcast radio was only 20 years old, making the programme exceptionally innovative, daring, and all the more scary to listeners (Sandy omitted to mention that Welles’ radio version was a Halloween broadcast, making it even scarier).

Another reworking of the War of the Worlds myth was the 1996 movie, Independence Day.  As Sandy says, compared to the original, Independence Dayis totally overblown.  Quiet suburban streets are replaced by a ‘drama’ played out in the seats of power, with the world’s landmarks taking a twatting (the film’s director, Roland Emmerich says they took great delight in blowing up the White House).  But Sandy is right when he suggests that this big budget demolition lacks a psychological punch.  When you remove the invasion from suburbia, you lose the sublime tension.  It seems that Spielberg was well aware of this, as both Close Encounters and E.T. do the job brilliantly.

And this brings me round to the topic of Doctor Who.  A few years ago, I was speaking at aLondon Science Museum event with the Doctor Who writer (among other things!), Paul Cornell.  When the audience asked us about the contribution Doctor Whomade to science fiction, I was surprised to hear Paul say that he didn’t think Doctor Whowas science fiction.  He thought it was about ‘galaxy and chips’.  I was delighted with this response.  So much so that we’ve used it in our Science of Doctor Who show ever since!

When Peter Capaldi was asked by The Guardian newspaper why Doctor Who had kept its sense of wonder for so long, the Twelfth Doctor gave a similar response to Paul Cornell, “It is this relationship between the domestic and the epic.  The sense that there's a bridge, that a hand can be extended, and you can step from the Earth, from the supermarket car park, into the Andromeda nebulae or whatever”.  It’s that sublime tension again.

The book, Mark Brake's Space, Time, Machine, Monster, also examines how sci-fi helped build the world in which we live. It is is available to buy now from Amazon and the Candy Jar store.

TOMORROW'S WORLDS : MISSING A PAST

We take a side step today. Mark Brake, the author of Mark Brake’s Space, Time, Machine, Monster (featuring sections on Doctor Who) reviews last night’s Tomorrow’s Worlds – a programme about the history of sci-fi. Next week is a Doctor Who heavy episode. Don’t miss it!

On TV, no one can hear you scream.

Or at least that’s what it seemed like last night, as I screamed enthusiastically at historian Dominic Sandbrook’s presentation of Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction, on BBC Two.

Dominic did a reasonable job of guiding us through the science fiction of space, the first theme of this four-part series. But as his focus was film, I felt his theories were left a little lacking in leaving out a lot of the fiction that had inspired the movies.

Witness Dominic’s account of the roots of sci-fi. The origin of it all, he says, comes from tales of trips to the Moon, from the likes of Jules Verne. You can see why Dominic took this tack.  Verne’s book was very influential on one of sci-fi’s first ever films – Le Voyage dans la Lune, a 1902 French silent movie, directed by Georges Méliès.

And yet the first Moon stories of sci-fi were published in the 1630s, over two centuries before Jules Verne, and way before the days of cinema.  Both Somnium, by Johannes Kepler, and A Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (the Bishop of Llandaff in Cardiff!) were lunar journeys that involved meetings with alien life. Dominic says the cool thing about Jules Verne is that he got the maths right.  Well, Johannes Kepler was Imperial Mathematician to the Pope! Kepler really got his maths right. He was the man who gave us the laws of how the planets move in orbit about the Sun!

Perhaps the programme’s biggest problem was ignoring the influence of that Shakespeare of sci-fi, HG Wells.

Dominic suggested that Star Trek was Victorian in its attitude to other peoples and nations. But, that most influential of the Victorian writers, Wells had warned against such an attitude with The War of the Worlds, a cautionary tale about empires swanning around as if they owned the place.

The programme also suggested that Victorian sci-fi had put man at the centre of the Universe. And yet, the era’s most influential work, The War of the Worlds did exactly the opposite; humans are faced with the technologically superior and invading Martians (I suspect Dominic is conveniently keeping this Wells tale for the next episode on ‘Invasion’).

Next up, Dominic introduces the movie masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its author, Arthur C Clarke, was determined to move humans from their assumed centre of the cosmos, according to Dominic. And yet Clarke’s entire approach was greatly influenced by Wells who had quoted Kepler when he said of alien life, “But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? … Are we, or they, Lords of the World? … And how are all things made for man?” In other words, who’s boss of the Universe?! Clarke was following a line started by Kepler, and carried on by Wells.

Still, even though the programme missed out on this longer fictional view for the sake of film, it was nonetheless thought provoking.

The link between the sea and space was conjured up in the programme’s account of the James Cameron movie, Avatar. The film’s main planet, Pandora, presented an ecology very reminiscent of deep sea ecology on Earth. This is no doubt influenced by Cameron’s journey to the Mariana Trench; he’s the first person ever do a solo descent to this deepest part of the ocean.

Science fiction began in the days of Shakespeare. It was Kepler who had first encouraged the building of ships fit for space.  In the last few minutes of the programme, Dominic claimed the desire for space has fizzled out.  No doubt the script was written and filmed before the ESA Rosetta mission successfully plonked a lander on a comet speeding at 40,000mph, much to the adoring delight of the world on social media!

I look forward to the next three episodes; on invasion, robots, and time travel respectively.  Hopefully, people will come out of Tomorrow’s Worlds wanting to know and read more.

The book, Mark Brake's Space, Time, Machine, Monster, also examines how sci-fi helped build the world in which we live. It is is available to buy now from Amazon and the Candy Jar store.