2023-12-20 00:21:24
One of the fathers of literary science fiction, HG Wells (The invisible man), He was characterized by pouring his socialist ideas into his novels. And it’s not something that everyone likes. He often remembers a phrase that the brilliant GK Chesterton dedicated to him. (The man who was Thursday): Wells was a storyteller who had sold his natural talent “for a plate of message.” This reminder serves as an example that requests for apolitical art, or less political art, or political in another way (because ideology is often what others have), are not a thing of the present.
Cory Doctorow, journalist: “In the future our enemy will look more like an Apple license than the Terminator”
Diverse voices from philosophy and sociology have reflected on the ways in which the future is imagined from postmodernism. Authors such as Frderic Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher have discussed the imaginative impotence of a culture that constantly fantasizes about the end of almost all things, but from the rigid frameworks of what Fisher called “capitalist realism.” The late British essayist pointed out a paradox: the notion of the end of history defended by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, according to which (neo)liberal parliamentary democracy established itself as the only possible world, had been ridiculed, but that same idea was being assumed in the realm of the cultural unconscious.
In this playing field, the possibility of imagining other futures has obvious political connotations. And the Canadian Cory Doctorow is making merits to become a kind of HG Wells of our present of digitalization of lives, video surveillance and technological corporations. In short: our everyday cyberpunk. Because, unfortunately, the daily life we live has disturbing points of contact with the dark fantasies about inequalities in access to social rights, capital and technology that were imagined since the 80s of Thatcher, Reagan, the cuts in social spending and the privatization of almost everything.
The epic of living differently
In recent months, two works by Doctorow have been published in Spain, both courtesy of Captain Swing: the succulent set of short novels Radicalized and the exciting feat of strength narrative Walkaway, a voluminous novel that summarizes the author’s ambivalent position regarding technological progress. The novel is about three people who want to escape from a society that has given an authoritarian and elitist response to ecological collapse. Therefore, they decide start walking: living in areas abandoned by corporations that are repopulated by a kind of hippies 2.0. The talented Limpopo serves as a role model for the trio.
Walkaway It also has another curious element. Its forceful criticism of the present and its possible futures, explicitly politicized through dialogues with elements of ideological debate, coexists with the narration of dramatic battles and love plots. As in the classic anarcho-feminist science fiction novel Woman on the edge of time, the defense of other ways of living and relating ends up generating a military conflict (because, remember, there is no alternative and there cannot be one). Doctorow redirects, nuances and complicates the model of genre narrative oriented toward entertainment and suitable for all types of readers, but he does not completely distance himself from it.
Walkaway It shows us a humanity on the edge of the abyss. A near future where the use (for other purposes, from other points of view) of a part of the technology that has led us to ecological disaster can allow that other possible world that is not focused on the profit motive and the desire for growth. economic. 3D printers, the recovery of materials and the automation of tasks allow you to build communities without the need for large investment capital to subjugate you. And all human beings can achieve a kind of cybernetic immortality, although that does not appease the anguish over the death of bodies.
A xenofeminist ‘reboot’ for the human species
María Reimóndez travels through more common landscapes in her meritorious novel GreedSpanish translation published by Two Mustaches from the Galician original greed. The author of it draws a dystopia in two times with feminist, environmentalist and anti-colonial elements about economic powers that are introduced into the intimacy of bodies and the reproduction of life. The setting is a planet collapsed due to plastic pollution and a tendency towards sterility that makes women capable of giving birth coveted.
Its two narrative lines deal with feminine disobedience that can be exercised through cunning and intellect, but also through physical violence (the latter is carried out by a small group of xenofeminist action heroines). The writer draws frames of totalitarian asphyxiation that the different protagonists manage to shake so that revolutionary transformations can germinate. And all this opens the door to the conception of a new world that the author herself has addressed in the sequel. Multitudes (published in Galician by the publisher general).
The work honors a certain tradition of feminist science fiction that can be exemplified in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. There is a lot of speech, but also certain doses of spectacle that avoids the tonalities closest to the epic of Walkaway. According to Reimóndez’s story, biotechnology is, at the same time, an instrument of terrible oppressions and possibilities for change through a kind of reboot of civilization.
Breathe somewhere else
Between the criticism of technology and the possibility of emancipatory and liberating uses of it, Doctorow of Walkaway he ended up escaping the duality between technopessimism and technooptimism. Perhaps his work could be considered a sample of techno-concerns that are considered potentially solvable. The narrator Becky Chambers takes us to a very different world through her diptych of short novels Monk and robotedited in Spanish by Chrononaut: Its inhabitants have chosen to reduce or eliminate the virtualization and screenization of lives.
The protagonists of the story are a man on a journey of rethinking his life and a robot that has been sent to contact the human species after decades of mutually agreed estrangement. The result is an oddly placid piece of science fiction. For this calm spirit, for a certain taste for harmony (including tea ceremonies reminiscent of Zen Buddhism), it can refer to the mature work of Ursula K. Le Guin (The dispossessed). By using the artifice of talking about human experience from the point of view of artificial intelligences, you can refer to Stanislaw Lem of cyber attack o Robot Fables.
Chambers offers a narrative that shows us alternative paths, while reminding us that personal gestures will not save us as a species (“the good intentions of a few individuals had not been enough,” he writes). Everything conveys a certain air of youthful existentialism, because of that robot amazed by everything and that young but not so young person who can serve as a reflection of our extended adolescence. Reading provides a kind of escape, with a fantasy aspect hipster ruralist, which can be healing. Because sometimes, as the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, you want to go anywhere that does not belong to this world. To take a breath and continue.
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