dimensions in the future. Moreover, it is a “slice
of life,” recounting the escapades and personal
challenges of a set of entertaining characters
who live in this complex and frenzied, stressful,
envisioned future. The integrative complexity and
everyday details of this envisioned future world
is revealed through the experiences of individual
characters. The book also includes hundreds of
Robida’s drawings (Robida was the first great
modern science fiction artist), creating for the
reader a multimedia experience of an envisioned
multimedia future (news has become orchestrat-
ed entertainment in Robida’s future).
As stated above, science fiction is often charac-
terized as juvenile. Yet, if this view of science fic-
tion means that its intellectual content is shallow,
repetitive, simplistic, and appealing to the imma-
ture motives and mindsets of youth, then Hyperi-
on, as well as the other novels just cited, by virtue
of their intellectual power and scholarly depth,
clearly contradict this characterization. Science
fiction is frequently mentally challenging; science
fiction, perhaps more than any other genre, idea
literature. It involves complex and penetrating
experiments in thinking and imagination. The
great works of science fiction make the reader
delve into the deepest and most philosophical-
ly and scientifically profound issues of life and
existence. It is the exact opposite of juvenile and
dumb.
So, although I proposed above that the psycho-
logical impact of science fiction is holistic, en-
gaging all the dimensions of the human mind,
including emotion, sensation, and personal identi-
ty, I do not intend to minimize the intellectual and
imaginative dimensions of the genre. We feel the
future through science fiction, but, probably more
so than any other form of fictional literature, we
are also asked to engage our cognitive, intellec-
tual, and abstract mental capacities within the
mind-boggling multiverse of science fiction. Sci-
ence fiction can be profound—more intellectually
demanding than any other form of literature; sci-
ence fiction can involve penetrating and elevating
“thought experiments” about the nature of reality.
The world around us can seem very shallow and
mundane after a journey through a good science
fiction story.
* * * * *
O
ff in the distance, receding away, I can hear
the faint voices of my friends heading back
to school after our lunch break. I should be
heading back as well, but the power of the world
of school and friends has lost its force, its sub-
stantiality, its necessity. The world around me
feels like an ephemeral dream—a momentary
blip—in comparison to the much bigger universe
in which my mind is immersed. For the last few
days, whenever I have had any free time, I have
been—in physical space—riveted to my desk in
...science fiction is, perhaps more than any
other genre, idea literature. It involves complex
and penetrating experiments in thinking and
imagination.
44 HF |
April 2019
my bedroom. But in the sphere of my conscious-
ness, I have been out roughly eight hundred
thousand years into the future. And if this mental
jump forward in time wasn’t enough to dis-equili-
brate my sense of reality, on this particular spring
afternoon, I find myself having been pulled fur-
ther forward, now millions upon millions of years
ahead in time, with the sun a swollen red giant
sitting motionless on the horizon, snowflakes fall-
ing on a deserted beach by a dark wine sea, with
gargantuan butterflies fluttering by overhead. The
ghostly voices of my friends fade to oblivion, lost
somewhere, long dead, in the “dark backward
abysm of time.” I am with the “Time Traveler” on
his journey into the far future reading H. G. Wells’
The Time Machine (published in 1895). much more profound and fundamental context.
It lost its obvious and intractable sense of reality
and hold on my consciousness. The world around
me felt suddenly eclipsed by the deeper and more
expansive cosmic reality of The Time Machine.
As Arthur C. Clarke stated, “Science fiction is an
escape into reality.”
Earlier that year I had seen the 1960 movie ver-
sion of The Time Machine, but now I am read-
ing the book, and the book is far more cosmic,
strange, and mind expanding than the movie.
(The movie only travels out eight hundred thou-
sand years into the future and has an inane
Hollywood happy ending.) In the book, I have
been powerfully yanked out of the present, of the
relative here and now, into the far reaches of time,
and the everyday world has become dramatical-
ly transitory and superficial, where before it had
seemed so permanent and real. I feel as if I am
seeing things the way they actually are, rather
than just some momentary glimpse, perspective,
or snapshot of existence. As the philosopher Spi-
noza would put it, I am viewing reality through the
“eyes of eternity.” The Time Machine provoked a deep insight.
Reading The Time Machine awakened in me
a sense of cosmic consciousness. In moving
into this imagined far distant future, humanity
(as a species) and modern human civilization
disappear; life on the earth evolves and then
slowly vanishes from the scene; the earth stops
revolving around the sun; and the sun itself, after
blazing yellow hot for countless ages, cools and
swells, threatening to envelop the earth. I get a
big picture of time and the whole shebang, dra-
matically and vividly realized in the book. I get a
more expansive sense of humanity’s place within
the big cosmic picture. This cosmic perspective,
when convincingly realized as in The Time Ma-
chine, is one of the most significant and enlight-
ening features of science fiction.
It was not so much that the future scenario ex-
plored in the book was strange or unreal; rather
it was that the “everyday” world was placed in a The expression “the future of everything,” intro-
duced earlier, can have two different meanings.
On one hand, “everything” can refer to all the
HF | Human Futures 45