Monday 20 July 2020

Charming Anachronism and the Historical Future Campaign

There is something deeply appealing about the future depicted in 60s and 70s SF. One in which there was interstellar travel, teleportation and aliens, but also filing cabinets, radios, and fax machines. The juxtaposition between dreamy vistas of fantastical alien worlds and the tactile quality of old-fashioned realia is intoxicating to me. I long to live in a time in which it is possible to fly to Pluto, but in which you have to buy a paper ticket in cash at an old-fashioned ticket booth in order to do so. 

The reality which we once inhabited is now rapidly disappearing before our eyes. The forests of telephone handsets, rolodexes, pencils and printers that used to surround us are vanishing into an ephemeral and textureless desert of digitised haze. As this happens, the charm of technology that you had to touch grows ever stronger. And as a result, the escapism of alternative futures - the futures that were possible once, but are no longer - begins to entice.

One of my favourite ever campaigns was a game of Cyberpunk 2020 which was set in 2020 as it was seen from the 1980s: all Soviet threat and looming nuclear war, mobile phones that looked like bricks, an AIDS pandemic in full swing, and nary a tweet in sight. If you wanted to take a picture of something, you had to have a (film) camera; if you wants to contact somebody, you had to call them up - or at best bleep their pager. 

Let us call this type of setting a 'historical future' campaign. This is one set not in a realistically imaginable future of the present, but in the actually imagined future of a particular point in the past. 

I am currently reading Jack Vance's Demon Princes series, set many hundreds of years in the future, but in which there is no internet (and indeed hardly any computerisation), people read physical newspapers and magazines, and everybody uses 'fake meters' to check notes and coins for counterfeits. A Demon Princes campaign would, in other words, be a historical future one - it is the far future as envisioned in the late 1960s. 

Another possibility would of course be the delicate utopian vistas of 1920s SF, of Metropolis or Ralph 124C41+ - glimmering, gleaming, calling us to a place in which pain is forgotten and our only limits are our own minds. 

The question then becomes: what is the earliest point in which a historical future campaign can be rooted? It is only since the 17th century or so that we can be said to be living in a world of what Foucault called 'open historicity', wherein it made sense to think that a far future could exist at all. Before then, it seems, when people imagined the future they were only at best seeing End Times. A historical future campaign set in the events of the Book of Revelation would be quite something. But then again perhaps this is the point at which a historical future campaign becomes an impossibility on a technical point, because for some those events remain a realisable future still. Whether or not, then, such a campaign would be truly science fiction or would be more properly called eschatology, is a question I leave to the theologists. 

40 comments:

  1. I think retro-futurism has been a big focus of sci fi since about the 90s. William Gibson’s short story “The Gernsbach Continuum” was an early meditation on the subject, and Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s book “The Difference Engine” kicked off the whole “steampunk” genre, which is just the most prominent retro-futurist vision.

    I haven’t read much sci fi in the last 20 years, but I think there’s a fair amount of this stuff out there. The “steampunk” thing has precedents in literature from the early 19th century, eg I remember a short story by AE Hoffman about a man being seduced by a clockwork automaton. For the 17th/18th century stuff, I’d say the whole “sailing ships on the ether sea to visit the spheres” stuff qualifies. See eg Cyrano de Bergerac for a precedent.

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    1. Yeah, although I am not sure if Cyrano de Bergerac and that ilk were writing about "the future" per se? I have read his proto-SF stuff, but it was so long ago I don't really remember.

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    2. I think you’re right. The scene I’m thinking of in Cyrano is where he’s acting like a madman to distract someone and he says he’s been to the moon, then goes on to describe the fantastical people there, how he got there etc.

      Maybe there’s no real literature of “technological” progress (as opposed to moral and intellectual progress) until the industrial revolution?

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    3. I definitely think technological progress only really became imaginable once people could see it taking place before their very eyes. Until the industrial revolution technological change happened so quickly that none of it took place during most people's lifetimes. Suddenly, it was relatively rapid.

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  2. From what I recall from uni, the Medievals were very into their wheel of fortune, and, as you say, the End Times. But does that hold true if you go back further? When Xenophon finds the ruins of then-ancient Assyria, would his mindset have enabled him to project forwards? The Greeks and Romans were certainly mindful of posterity on an individual level. Norse myths also depict a post-apocalyptic world after Ragnarok. The extent to which Hindu mythology imagines past eons is mind-bending. It is weird that ancient cultures had no trouble imagining wildly different, almost deep-time pasts, but not non-cyclical futures. Great post, thank you. I'll be mulling this one over for a while.

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    1. Yes. I think the point is that for the ancients time was cyclical; for the medievals, it was finite and ended in the apocalypse and rapture. It's only for moderns that it is linear and with no definite end.

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    2. > for the ancients time was cyclical; for the medievals, it was finite and ended in the apocalypse and rapture. It's only for moderns that it is linear and with no definite end.

      Sounds like you've been reading Mircea Eliade! (I have recently discovered him and am finding his work interesting)

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    3. I did read Eliade LONG ago, at university. I honestly can't remember that much about him, but I think if he made that observation it's definitely been borne out elsewhere.

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  3. This only works if everyone is very familiar with the ins & outs of the setting and can really get & stay in the right spirit. Playing Cyberpunk 2020 is the same as playing Pendragon the right way. My guess is the earliest point possible depends entirely on the age of your group (for something like Cyberpunk 2020, and many cold war & nuclear holocaust based futures), or how knowledgeable they are about the subject.

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    1. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way but you're right.

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  4. I think you are right on Retro-Futurism being a post-16th C creation.
    (For your consideration: https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/
    'In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress.
    Let me unpack that.')

    Wikipedia's Cyberpunk Derivatives page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Stonepunk) cites Stonepunk (as in the Stone Age) as a discrete sub-sub-genre. I believe it once mentioned Sandalpunk (as in Sword and Sandal, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sandalpunk), but that appears to have been removed (though it persists on TV Tropes, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SandalPunk, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunkPunk).

    Neither seem to be, truly speaking, Retro-Futurist - more semi-fantastical historical fiction. A form of Ancient Greek retrofuturism might be Jo Walton's Thessaly Trilogy, in which time-travellers attempt to set up Plato's Republic with the assistance of Apollo, Destroyer of Mice and Grey-Eyed Athena. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Just_City).

    I believe that the RPG Shadow of the Demon Lord is written to be played in an arc over eleven sessions (https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2019/01/echoes-and-reverberations-part-3-shadow.html). Perhaps this model could be tuned for use in a Medieval apocalypse?

    I've occasionally thought that you could get a fair amount of fun from a cyberpunk pastiche short story set in one of the earliest cities of the Fertile Crescent. Men in linen kilts trying to live out Noir cliches. The technological Johnny Mnemonic-esque MacGuffin would turn out to be the written word.

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    1. Gah. I wrote a long comment out in reply to this but it got deleted.

      The main point is that yes, Francis Bacon had a lot to answer for - and that progress is a modern invention. For pre-moderns, if anything, history was a long decline.

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  5. I think the Dune series roughly fits your historical future. It is a setting with the tactile tech that makes for a nice dream, which I, like you, enjoy.

    As a quibble with Foucault, he was certainly wrong about the advent of 'open historicity' (if he said that). There are plenty of examples of non-industrial peoples who imagined a far future. These were certainly not dreams about a technology paradise, but people did think about the distantly long-term. Foucault knew little about cultures outside Europe, and this consistently undermines his sweeping claims.

    I think your idea of biblical eschatology as science fiction is great. The Revelation of John features extraterrestrial beings and another world. Other ancient apocalyptic literature includes visionary journeys into the heavens (space above earth). The only reason not to call it sci-fi would be if somebody insisted that it had to include palpable hi-tech.

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    1. Yeah, Dune is a good example.

      Which non-industrial peoples imagined a far future in the SF sense? I think the point is not that people prior to the renaissance in Europe or in other parts of the world couldn't grasp the concept of tomorrow, next month, next year, next century or next millennium. The point is that it's only in the modern era that people have been able to imagine history as open - not closed and cyclical (like it was to the Maya) or linear but with an ending (like it was/is to Christians) but linear and infinite like it is to us today.

      I don't want to say eschatology is SF exactly. I think that denudes it of its mythic power. What I mean is that one could certainly think of it as a potential future. Although you could call that SF I guess!

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    2. Well, Aristotle and his pre-medieval followers imagined that the cosmos had no beginning and no end. We don't have speculative writing that survived about what the future might entail, but they conceived of the idea as non-cyclical. Some medieval astrologers across Europe and Asia calculated how many tens or hundreds of thousands of years were left before the end, and some of them speculated that there were races of beings before Adam, and at least a few wondered what might come after humankind. Just a few examples.

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    3. I can see Dune as being accurate prediction over the long term. Imagine: Computers get smaller and smaller, until little virtual-reality/internet computers the size of rice grains can be implanted in your brain for the cost of a cheap cell phone. Such customers spend all their time, slack-jawed, in computer-generated fantasies that directly stimulate their brains' pleasure centers. Eventually no one will be willing to devote time to feed and change the diapers of these unpalatable souls. They will therefore die off, leaving a future of space ships and ray guns to those uninterested in the little rice-grain fantasies.

      If I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet that mankind a thousand years from now will resemble Dune far more than it will resemble teenagers staring at smart phones.

      "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

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    4. @Lich - Which ones speculated about what might come after humankind? I am curious.

      @Geoffrey - I agree with this, although I think the change will come from natural selection. People interested in the rice-grain fantasies, as you put it, will not reproduce. Those who are not, will tend to have children. Gradually, the disposition to be risk-taking and adventurous will become more prevalent in the human population than the desire to live in a lotus-eating dreamworld.

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    5. I suggest starting with Abu Ma`shar al-Balkhi and his historical astrology. There was a historian named Mutahhar al-Maqdisi (not the geographer) a little later who speculated about this stuff. And a generation after that, an anonymous historian in Egypt wrote about these kinds of things. I'm sorry to say it's all in Arabic!

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    6. @noisms - I agree about the natural selection. I think that those giving birth to the wave of the future are hard-core homeschooling moms who never let any of their seven children have cell phones.

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    7. Yes, I agree with that prediction.

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    8. I think a lot of historical SciFi authors did not write about the future, but about foreign places.
      If you think about it what is Utopia but an story about an society that developed a new better form of goverment.

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  6. This really made me think.

    John Higgs's most recent book, The Future Starts Here - http://johnhiggs.com/books/the-future-starts-here/ - talks a lot about the changes in sci-fi and how our futures are now all dystopian - and we struggle even to imagine anything else any more. He has a particularly interesting bit on how the Star Trek universe has gone through several changes from the utopian show it started out as, and each has reflected changes in society's beliefs and aspirations at the time.

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    1. It is worth reflecting that Next Gen only finished in the mid-90s. It only took 25 years to get from there to a world in which such fiction is unimaginable.

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  7. I've always liked this about Vance. There's something great about the hero landing in his spaceship then sneaking into the baddie's office to search for paper files in file cabinets.

    I also think "space boat" and "air car" to describe smallish futuristic vehicles increases that tactile sense. Those terms give a sense of a comprehensible machine that you could work on in your garage.

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    1. Yes. I wonder what we will call those things if and when they exist.

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  8. I was lucky enough in college to have a professor who let me submit an RPG game about Jules Vern-esque space travel as my final project for a course about retro-futurism.

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    1. And did you publish this great opus???

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  9. "Before then, it seems, when people imagined the future they were only at best seeing End Times"
    Bold of you to assume we aren't exactly the same now. As Lewis said, "What [these threats of extinction] have really done is remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in, which, during [that] prosperous period... we were beginning to forget. This reminder... is a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about reality."

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    1. It's a fair point. We seem wired to expect apocalypses.

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  10. The idea of "historical futures" goes deep. For a start here are three distinctions to play with: there are futures as seen from and written in the 1960s knowing nothing of what happened after, and there are futures as seen from today grounded in an understanding of the general 1960s environment from real sources, and there are futures as seen from today grounded in the specific milieu of a 1960s writer (say PKD).

    The first is classic SF speculation which *only* in later decades can be experienced as an "historical future". The second is a nostalgic or aesthetic appreciation of the trappings, furniture, fashions, demographics, popular contraptions and general technological limitations of our chosen decade. Those limitations serve to emphasise our futuristic innovations. We could call these *Antique Futures*. The third is a homage to a writer (or group of writers) of the first. We feel we are losing focus and purpose when we deviate from the locales and characters of our writer. Lovecraft's selective perception of his era lacked the recreative breadth of James Joyce. We reawaken Lovecraft by concentrating on his repetitive imagery.

    To loosen things up, for example I tend to imagine many of the PKD settings as filmed in luxurious colour by Alfred Hitchcock. The way he shoots apartments, offices, suits, slick hair, excellent looking blonde women classily dressed, murderers, surprise villains. Also Gabor Lux wrote a very good scenario, a free pdf, called Systema Tartarobasis (? from memory), which is grounded in a 1920s Flash Gordon aesthetic (as far as I can tell). I enjoyed reading it back in the day.

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    1. You should write more of this sort of thing.

      I like the notion of PKD shot through the lens of Hitchcock.

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  11. I've read Vance's Demon Princes twice. Once as a teen in the mid 80s, and again just a few years ago. The first time it seemed quite contemporary sci-fi, only the filament recorders struck me as weirdly dated. Of course nothing looked very cutting edge either, I don't know if any of it did when it was published in the sixties. It was only during the second reading that I became aware how very retro futuristic the books feel now and how rooted they are in a past age. Maybe I just didn't pay enough attention to the technology the first time.

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    1. Very interesting data point! I don't really read any contemporary sci-fi, but I wonder what sort of things feel "normal" in a sci-fi setting now but will feel retro-futuristic in 30-40 years.

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    2. I'd reckon anything that involves characters driving/flying around in sci-fi vehicles themselves as opposed to everything being completely auto-piloted.

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  12. "I long to live in a time in which it is possible to fly to Pluto, but in which you have to buy a paper ticket in cash at an old-fashioned ticket booth in order to do so."

    I love it! Just a little shorter, and it would make a great t-shirt.

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    1. I might put it on a face mask if I'm forced to wear one.

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  13. Check out this blog, it's a vast archive of this sort of thing: paleofuture.com

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  14. Many of the Greeks seem to have had ideas which could make for a retro-futuristic vision. Legendary geniuses like Hephaustus and Daedelus and (more accurately) Archimedes were understood as able to make advanced technology - although one would run the risk of projecting modern ideas onto them (e.g. modern understanding of robotics onto "living statues".)

    Some believed that history was "flat" or an endless downhill slope from a Golden Age (not unreasonably, given they were extrapolating from the greatest Cyclopean monuments of past milennia, huge bones that they suspected were from gigantic earlier generations, people genuinely had gotten unhealthier since the adoption of agriculture, etc). Such "futurism", about a world growing ever worse, would be rather depressing.

    But this tendency is often exaggerated and many were more optimistic; some examples are discussed here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/idea-of-progress-a-bibliographical-essay-by-robert-nisbet#lf-essay004lev1sec01

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