Just finished watching the first two episodes of Firefly again. When I first saw it, I was completely captivated by the notion that we could terraform large numbers of planets, and yet not colonize them in the exact same ways. So much representation of the future is as if Starbucks were a space corporation: most high tech futures are wildly uniform, with shiny interiors and lots of glass and chrome and so on.
The idea that space would be a variable place, technologically, is both wildly genre-breaking (rebels in a Firefly-class cargo rocket-ship robbing a train; Wild West meets the Final Frontier) and likely (why wouldn't we reproduce the same wildly unfair distribution of wealth and technology as we currently do?). So: there are the central planets, and the outer ones; the fascistic Alliance (military clothing style, but also means of control and ethics-free politics) and those outside of the Alliance (see unfair distribution of wealth and technology).
My friend Chris Gray once said the best political theory lies in novels. And I thought about this today while thinking about the sci fi I've been reading and watching: Firefly, Star Trek (the recent J J Abrams prequel, as well as Star Trek: Next Gen), The Windup Girl, Pump 6. Let's take The Windup Girl. In the 23rd Century, according to Wikpedia,
Global Warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and mega corporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile.
This is interesting to read, as a summary, but it is the narrative about Anderson Lake (the AgriGen agent in Thailand) and the others that allows for the three elements of rhetoric to emerge:
1. Ethos: the novel finds a way to make the future extrapolation of current biotech and industrial practices realistic, and possible. The coherence and horrifying detailed enactment of this potential future is what gives the novel - and its implicit political argument - such ethos, that is, authority.
2. Logos: the way this world emerged out of the one we now inhabit is logical; the causes of successive disasters in food, in climate change, and in political inability to deal coherently with these disasters all come across as not only rationally, but even likely. The novel thus comprises an argument about corporate control of genetic engineering and biotechnology, and the dystopian results not only for the recolonized Third World and the South but also the so-called First World and the North.
3. Pathos: the specific dramatization of characters involved in this world, as well as the readers identification with characters who suffer at the hands both of the ruthless biotech corporations, and also at the hands of the history that included our own time's inept policies, all make us feel something: horror at what will have been lost, anger at those who caused and promoted such a world, grief at the world humans may inherit.
Good theory and good popularizations of science also do this; they hit all three of these marks.
Today I imagined using the internet to form a space for scientific debate in a number of areas vital to human and biological survival: genetics, energy, etc. In these areas, a wider range of people could weigh in than the usual suspects (writers of popular science books; journalists of science and technology; industry PR people; political parties and individuals) and create a second tier of science and technology small d democracy.
I guess first of all, it would be great to ask the question David Nye asks: should "the market" fund technology development? And a corollary: facing global disaster due to climate change, and facing economic disaster due to the unsustainable practices of late capitalism and its oligarchic zombie corporations (which are like the Borg and the Terminator: huge square and you can't reason with them) how can we pull our science and technology research out of military development and find ways to direct our resources at species survival?
It is interesting how few science fiction books have faced the ugly futures staring humans in the face. Biopunk novels like Windup Girl are one genre that doesn't shy away from this; another is the dystopian/utopian sci fi genre (novels like le Guin's The Dispossessed and Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist series). What would a lively discussion of the real consequences of our science and technology practices look like on the Net? And could it link classrooms and listservs and political movements using not simply stripped down argumentation, but the fuller rhetorical resources of novels?
No comments:
Post a Comment