Jerome, Zamyatin, Orwell, Bradbury

I've got amazing powers of observation
Pink Floyd Nobody Home

I read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 when I was thirteen or fourteen years old--the book in Russian translation was in my parents' library. I liked it a lot, but to me the novel seemed too pessimistic; after all, like the majority of the Soviet Union's population, I was brought up to believe that the humanity was just one step away from the luminous future of total prosperity and happiness. So, I thought of Fahrenheit 451 as a wonderful piece of science fiction whose author just happened to be a nihilist. I read all short stories that were included into the book. One of them, The Murderer, was quite memorable partly because the narration had an unexpected humorous tone, and I brought my friends and myself to hysterical laughter reading it to them. Yet, the characters, events and technological fantasies seemed in many cases, like The Fox and the Forest of 1951, improbable or irrelevant--it still was just a fiction albeit scientific, same as The Hour of Bull (1968) by Ivan Efremov (the novel was banned in the USSR in 60s and 70s; I really appreciated it when I had a chance to get it into my hands, but found his The Andromeda Nebula of 1957 too rosy and boring despite the fact that it was highly acclaimed by the Soviet literary officialdom), Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars (1961), The Ugly Swans (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, Isaac Asimov's stories, and others. That was one of the reasons why eventually I lost my interest to the science fiction genre in the early 1980s, but I never forgot those books--they played an important role in forming my philosophic views.

Then I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the first four years of the chaos and turmoil of the post-Soviet Russia. My family and I were very fortunate to stay in Japan for two years. Since 1997 we have been residing in Canada. It was amazing to witness how rapidly new technologies were changing the daily reality, lifestyle, and psychology of the society and individuals. That was when those books I had read so many years ago started ringing some new bells. Ray Bradbury's The Murderer, published in 1953, sounds like a 2009 story or a news report about somebody who decided to rebel against being wired and online 24/7/365. Ray Bradbury with an astonishing precision predicted what kind of detrimental effects could be brought about to the human nature and behavior by technology. That was impressive enough to revisit his ideas as well as other serious sci-fi writers. Then, I finally read 1984. Despite the fact that it was greatly influenced by Yevgeny Zamiatin's novel We, George Orwell taps into his own power of observation which brings him among other things a foresight of a dispute over the Arctic between the "super-states." However, for the sake of fairness, it should be noted that Zamiatin himself was not completely original in his view on the future of the humankind--allegedly he was familiar with Jerome K. Jerome's (I read his Three Men in a Boat in Russian translation in mid-70s and in English several years ago--one of the best comic books ever written) The New Utopia (1891) and borrowed some ideas from this work. However, it's unlikely that Zamiatin would have included Jerome K. Jerome's concepts into his writing if he had totally disagreed with them; same applies to Orwell. It means that they all, through studying history and observing their contemporary societies, built extrapolations and projections of the future and came to the similar conclusions. And the works of their predecessors confirmed that they were on the right track.

It looks like life is finally catching up with the best pieces of science fiction of 50s and 60s and many of them read like today's accounts. But the work of the observant mind never stops--even the popular culture in the last 10-15 years (films like Blade Runner, Fortress, Outbreak, Twelve Monkeys, Gattaca, The Matrix, Artificial Intelligence: AI, Minority Report, I Robot, The Island, Children of Men to name the few) created a very detailed picture the human civilization can turn into within 100-200 years. This picture doesn't seem very appealing, but it probably shouldn't concern us, should it? Aren't these merely futuristic fantasies of pessimistic culturati, which have no chance to come true? Time will tell, but at least we have been warned.