Science Fact is all Fiction

One of the more remarkable things about any event that happens in the world, particularly if it has an enormous impact is that when the first couple of news cycles have gone through broadcasters start looking for new twists on old stories. At which point things that are cited as ‘influences’ often start to appear. Marilyn Manson is a prime example, being cited for violence in American schools, but there are literary examples as well.

That particularly branch of literature called Science Fiction is involved with looking forwards (mostly), the genre is huge so when authors look forwards and try to imagine the future one or two of them are inevitably going to get lucky. No one comments on those authors that predicted that we’d be attacked by little green residents of the moon the moment we got there, that’s ridiculous, it’s all fiction, of course they’re not trying to portray the truth, and yet somehow they end up commenting on that one book that successfully predicted the future.

Orwell’s ‘1984’ seems to be mentioned every other hour at the moment, and the man himself is presented as a cynical prophet. Like any good Science Fiction writer he looked at things around him, took a few guesses as to where it all might end up and wrote it down. The fact he was largely right is neither here nor there.

But then, was he right? ‘1984’ has parallels, but they are parallels that are drawn by people looking to make a point, the book has a negative outlook, so it’s invoked every time anyone wants to criticise what they see as a restriction of civil liberties. Take the whole subject further back in time to Nostradamus that famous prophet who predicted Hitler also predicted a Chinese Russian war that would destroy most of the world. He also predicted a hell of a lot else, and guess what? It didn’t come true, that doesn’t make him a prophet, that makes him someone predicting the future who got it almost completely wrong and made a few references that were oblique enough for someone to seize upon them and go from there. It’s not like it really matters to him whether he was right or not, does it?

The most disconcerting ones come back to the Manson parallel. Shortly after 9/11 I was listening to the radio and they interviewed Tom Clancy, the immensely successful American author who, in one of his books, wrote about a plane that crashed into Capitol Hill with the entirety of the cabinet, much of Congress and the President inside. The interviewer asked a lot of questions about his inspiration for the story, what his intentions were, and the reply was that it seemed like a feasible possibility and good fabric for a story. The implication was that stories such as Clancy’s might have given the idea for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11, as if they wouldn’t have been able to think on their own that a plane crashing into a building would cause widespread panic, fear, and significant damage to whatever it ended up hitting.

The arts will always be attributed a certain amount of responsibility whenever something happens, because man is always able to imagine something before he actually does it, that’s how the invention process works. I wonder how many authors would be comfortable with the idea that their dystopian visions might just end up being a deciding factor in the next world tragedy...