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is someone like Alvin Toffier, with his
Third Wave,
the society of the future,
in which we will inhabit "electronic cottages," and work at home on our
computers, literalizing the "Literary Machine" that was the nightmare of
madness or despair for Gissing's poor writer of a century ago. There are
also our current academic Morlocks with their flimflams of hypertext
which will magically turn illiterates into Tolstoys, and with their virtual
universities that will eventually contain virtual students. This faithful tech–
nological flock affirm that utopia is beckoning to us from the electronic
world out there in cyberspace. As for the rest, utopias these days, like good
men all the time, are hard to find.
But dystopias are not. As for our professorial technophiles, one might
recommend to them some post-modern cyberpunk science fiction, such as
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's
The Difference Engine.
Set in England
in 1855, this anti-novel presages the past by projecting it as an already
computerized universe in which Babbage's calculating machine has been
perfected, and in which a fictional character such as Sybil from Disraeli
sleeps with the likes of Edwin Chadwick and Charles Kingsley, among
others. Progress and evolution have naturally been supplanted by disconti–
nuity, contingency, and catastrophe, and the Victorian past is portended as
the loony bin that the future present is fondly commemorated as being. Or
there is Margaret Atwood's popular
The Handmaid's Tale,
a feminist
dystopia in which women are deprived of their literacy, their voices, their
entire access to the privileged domain of written culture. Indeed, as far as
I am able to tell, most current representations of the future seem to be
tending toward dystopia. One of the more frequent among recent itera–
tions is to be found in those novels and films that imagine the world after
either a nuclear war or some equivalently annoying ecological catastrophe
has occurred. Such opera as
Blade Runner,
in either version, or
Mad Max
or
Paul Auster's
In the Country
if
Last Things
are convenient illustrations to
hand. This last example begins with the following characteristically
ambiguous sentence: "These are the last things, she wrote." And it goes on
to memorialize a post-disaster world that is familiarly Hobbesian, that fea–
tures zero degree of human possibility. Everyone is consumed by the wish
to die: there are suicide sects and euthanasia clinics that are hard to get into
because their waiting lists are so long; there are assassination clubs, and
those who unfortunately remain alive have become homeless-the new
universal condition. Life has become both post-human and posthumous;
memories have gone the way of expectations, including memories of the
future; the best work
to
be had is that of a Garbage Broker, and each indi–
vidual survivor has learned to speak a private language. Human life, as we
know it, has become, we are supposed to imagine, literally unbearable.
As for those academics and journalists who are currently writing books
and articles about the "global situation" (nothing on a smaller scale appears
