Futures Volume 7 Issue 1 1975 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2875%2990034-8] I.F. Clarke -- 5. Any More for the Time Machine

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 7 Issue 1 1975 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2875%2990034-8] I.F. Clarke -- 5. Any More for the

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58

From

Prophecy to Prediction

From

Prophecy f.

serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction

o Ideas developments in predictive

fiction and first attempts to forecast

the future scientifically.

5. Any more for the time machine?

I. F. Clarke

Now that the recent articles on Marx

and Darwin have brought this series

to the end of the first year of publica-

tion it falls to the editor to inaugurate

a new year with a private prophecy.

The historians of the future he guesses

will describe the second half of the 20th

century as The Age of Reappraisal;

and the school-children of 2075

AD

if

their great-grandparents have been

successful will learn from their history

tapes that ecological pollution the

growth of population and all the other

problems of the old days obliged the

citizens of the late 20th century to

reconsider the relationship between

science and society. Today we are

going through the painful but salutary

process of saying goodbye to a set of

assumptions about the advantages of

uncontrolled technological development

and the certainty of continuing social

progress. The historians and social

analysts of our time-with the sublime

exception of the Hudson optimists-

have abandoned the simple faith of

their predecessors; and now that we

have most of us grown wiser after the

experiences of two world wars and of

world economic depressions it is no

longer possible to follow the example

of Neil Arnott Fellow of the Royal

Society and Physician Extraordinary to

I. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department of

English Studies University of Strathclyde. He

received the Pilgrim Award for 1974 from the

Science Fiction Research Association of America

in recognition of his contributions to their field.

the Queen who summed up the

beliefs and expectations of 1861 in his

book A Survey of Human Progress In the

style of his time he promised to give

the reader an account of mankinds

advance from the savage state to the

highest civilisation yet attained. A

progress as little perceived by the

multitude in any age as is the slow

growing of a tree by the children who

play under its shade-but which is

leading to a new condition of mankind

on earth.

That emphatic statement like the

many histories of progress in the last

century was the natural and sponta-

neous revelation of an entirely new

attitude of mind that separates the

industrial civilisation of the 19th cen-

tury from the rest of human history.

The Arnott Proposition affects us still;

for we are the inheritors of very original

and immensely powerful ideas that

made the 19th century the first great

epoch of secular prophecy and-in the

last decades of the century-established

the base for modern developments in

social and technological forecasting.

In a clumsy but convenient phrase

the technological advances and the

many intellectual discoveries of the last

century generated a climate of expecta-

tion. Behind the evolutionary theories

of Darwin the political prophecies of

Marx and the innumerable forecasts of

the changes yet to come there was a

dominant sequential explanation for

the place and purpose of mankind upon

FUTURES February 975


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The detailed study of ancient civilisations, which

began in the early 18OOs, confirmed the belief in

progress above).

Time to come right): the steamship

Great

Eastern like the other technological develop-

ments of the age, was a promise of great

advances yet to come.


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Time to come: the Schneider and Hersaut plan for

a Channel Bridge in 1889 was an acceptable engi-

neering project that promised straight-through

railway links between Glasgow, Paris, Moscow and

Constantinople.

Time to come: the vision of the future depended on

temperament and purpose. For H. G. Wells the hills

of England would one day carry gigantic wind

wheels . . .

for the American author of The

Last American

i1893

the future belonged to the Persians, who

would reconstruct their own idea of life in Ancient

Nhu-Yok.


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From Prophecy to Prediction 61

our planet-an explanation that em-

braced the past present and future of

the human race. The idea of progress

is a shorthand way of saying that many

different factors worked one upon the

other to promote a distinctly new

attitude to time and to mans place in

nature.

The major factor-constant

universal evident to all-was the range

of spectacular developments in tech-

nology; and an indication of what these

meant for the Victorians appears in a

boys book of 1876 Discoveries and

Inventions of the Twentieth Century. The

author Robert Routledge passed on

the wisdom of the elders to the young in

an enthusiastic account of the marvels

of science :

But so much have these things become in

the present day matters of course that it is

difficult for one who has not witnessed the

revolution produced by such applications of

science to realise their full imnortance. Let

the young reader who wishes to understand

why the present epoch is worthy of admira-

tion as a stage in the progress of mankind

address himself to some intelligent person

old enough to remember the century in its

teens; let him inquire what wonderful

changes in the aspect of things have been

comprised within ihe experience of a single

lifetime and let him ask what has broueht

about these changes. He will be told of The

railway and the steamship and the tele-

graph and the great guns and the mighty

ships of war.

As the young learned to perceive the

chain of cause and effect between

technological development and social

improvement the discoveries of the

geologists and the fossil-hunters worked

in parallel with the facts of engineering

enterprise to reinforce and enlarge the

idea of progress. And here again the

new knowledge established another

major difference between the 19th

century scheme of things and all the

philosophies of history that had served

all previous ages. Traditional teaching

for example had maintained that the

world was of recent origin; and al-

though foolish undergraduates still

laugh on hearing that Archbishop

Ussher had fixed the date of creation as

4004 BC they think more respectfully of

that one-time Chancellor of St Patricks

Dublin when they discover that

Malthus wrote in the Essay on Population

about the five or six thousand years

that the world has existed. That

venerable belief in the novity of the

world vanished in an explosion of

discoveries and theories which the

work of Baron Georges Cuvier and Sir

Charles Lye11 touched off. These two

remarkable men revealed the immensity

of the geological past and in doing this

they taught their contemporaries how

to become time-travellers. The French-

man applied his knowledge of com-

parative anatomy to the study of the

remote past and he revealed the nature

and workings of the extraordinary

creatures then being discovered in the

Paris rock formations. When Cuvier

was admitted to the French Academy

in 1818 the formal address of welcome

noted the methods by which he made

the past come to life: You have

recreated them in a manner of speak-

ing; and by penetrating to the depths

in which these bones were buried you

have travelled back with them through

the centuries.

Twelve years afterwards Sir Charles

Lye11 extended the work of Cuvier by

his publication of The Principles of

Geology a book which for once in all

truth can be called epoch-making.

Lye11 revealed the unbelievable anti-

quity of the planet by demonstrating

the various epochs in the long long

sequence from the teaming oceans of

the Cambrian to the arrival of the

primates in the Pleiocene. As the dis-

coveries of the palaeontologists changed

the mental perspective of the Victorians

the popularisers of science wrote books

for readers who were eager to make the

journey through the dark backward of

geological time. So the amateur

palaeontologist Thomas Hawkins be-

gan his Book of the Great Sea Dragons by

promising a trip to the age of the

dinosaurs : To wander across the

desert Continents of Time in search of

the bleached skeletons

of extinct

Nations; to remove from the dust of



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62

From Pro y to Predicti on

Oblivion the countless Generations

which have passed away from the Earth

for ever. What had caught the

imagination was the astonishing scale

of the evolutionary process; and the

excitement still comes through in a

publication of 1847

The Ancient World,

or ~ i ct~Tes~~e Sketches of Creati on. The

preface announces the intention of the

author which is to communicate in a

simple form to the general reader the

chief results of Geological Investiga-

tion. In the first paragraph of his first

chapter he begins on the scenario

written into the record of the rocks:

Long-very long ago-many ages

before the creation of Man this world

on which we dwell existed as the habi-

tation of living beings different from

those now tenanting its surface or

inhabiting the ocean which covers so

large a part of it. Later on as he

warmed to the task of reconstructing

the past he caused the dead bones to

come alive in imaginative descriptions:

Imagine then one of these monstruous

animals a P~es~os~~r~ ome sixteen or

twenty feet long with a small wedge-

shaped crocodilian head a long arched

serpent-like neck. . . Imagine for a

moment this creature slowly emerging

from the muddy banks and half walk-

ing half creeping along.

Thii animated description is one of

the many indicators that point to a

change in attitude and outlook that was

as profound and far-reaching as the

new way of regarding Europe and the

planet that followed on the discovery

of the Americas. The geologists and the

palaeontoiogists had opened up a new

world in the far-off past at the same time

as the achievements of the engineers

and the scientists revealed the other

new world that waited for all in the

future. Out of the discoveries and the

inventions there emerged a mental

geography that enabled the Victorians

to locate themselves and their nations

in a self-explanatory system. In fact

the illustrated magazines for the middle

classes and the ever-growing flood of

books for the newly literate masses

show that by the 1860s the evidence of

universal pro~ess~volutionary and

technological-had encouraged the

citizens of the industrial nations to see

themselves and their societies in a state

of perpetual motion. The idea of pro-

gress was a marvellous time-machine;

it allowed all to see nature and society

in the act of moving from the less perfect

to the more perfect.

The popularisers joined with the pro-

fessors in prophecies of the future. That

redoubtable defender of Darwin

Thomas Henry Huxley drew from the

evidence of the past the benign lesson

that thoughtful men once escaped

from the blinding influences of tradi-

tional prejudice will find in the lowly

stock whence man has sprung the best

evidence of the splendour of his

capacities; and will discern in his long

progress through the past a reasonable

ground of faith in his attainment of a

nobler future. Across the Atlantic an

undistinguished Missouri lawyer from

Platte City wrote with equal assurance

about an imagined meeting with his

heat-heat-band-daughter in 1980 :

The lady explained that, as science

progressed,

Man r d uoon sea and in air.

That storms Gere forbidden- e sea kept

at rest,

And seasons made titfid and fair;

That flowers and animals, far away

reared,

Were acclimated here and grew wild;

And a motor, much stronger than steam,

had appeared,

Yet cheap, economic and mild.

The dominant ideology of any age

shows itself most clearly in the instruc-

tion of the young; and the workings of

the universal consensus on the idea of

progress can be examined in two books

for juveniles of 1865. In Lhomme de@

cinq m s uns there is the standard

linking of past present and future. The

author gives a dramatic and episodic

account of the main stages in the evolu-

tion of human life beginning with the

first inhabitants of Paris and with

illustrations of mastodons roaming what

was later the Montmartre area; and he



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From Pro@ec~ to Prediction 63

closes with a chapter on the inventions

of the year 2865. Across the Channel,

for which the engineers had already

designed a tunnel, the author of

A

piston of wonde~f l naction

transmitted

the sacred doctrines of the race: there

is no limit to the grand dominion

man may in the end obtain.

And yet, despite the universal famili-

arity with the idea of the future, there

was remarkably little technological or

social forecasting before the end of the

century. At first sight it seems surprising

that during the period of accelerated

development between 1870 and 1900-

so many changes in warfare, armaments,

and technology-the Europeans and

the Americans were weII pleased with

fictional accounts---utopias, dystopias,

imaginary wars-that presented the

most likely pattern of future develop-

ments. There were reasons for this.

First, the major engineering enterprises

of the day came to the public in docu-

ments that were in effect technological

forecasts. Proposals for canals across

the Isthmus of Panama for steam com-

munication with India, and for the

improved navigation of Indian rivers

-like De Lesseps draft calculations for

the Suez Canal and Hector Horeaus

projection of a submarine railway

between France and England-all of

these contained estimates and forecasts

of the material and financial advantages

that would follow on construction.

Second, and much more important, the

general assumption that the march of

progress would go forward in the

known way, that the future would be

an improved model of 19th century

capitalistic and colonial society, sepa-

rated science from the social conse-

quences of technological development

in the thinking of most people before

the 20th century. For example, Pierre

Dronier in 1894 outlined his scheme for

a transatlantic air line in

La navigation

aerienne

and calculated that with his

new machines he could operate four

flights a month between New York and

Paris, carrying 100 passengers on every

Aight at a charge of 300 francs, But not

a word in all his arguments about the

changes that might follow on such a

development. In like manner another

forecast, Tw~~~ Cetitwy

~~~~tions,

published by George Sutherland in

1901, separated future developments

from their social consequences. He was

convinced that the submarine would

have a very limited part in warfare,

since it is hopeless to expect the eyes of

the sailor to see any great distance

under water. It would be the same in

the air:

Military aeronautics, ike submarine opera-

tions in naval warfare, have been somewhat

overrated. Visions of air-shipshovering over

a doomed city and devastating it with

miss dropped from above

are

mere fairy

tales. Indeed, the whole subject of aero-

nautics as an element in future human

progress has excited far more attention than

its intrinsic merits deserve.

These first essays in forecasting assumed

that, although there would be major

innovations in the future, the societies

that experienced these changes would

continue along the long established

lines of national history. Indeed, their

silliest but most sacred national songs

celebrated the fortunate union of the

nation with the idea of progress. The

many millions in the UK who sang with

such innocent gusto about the pre-

destined advance of the nation-

wider stiII and wider may thy bounds

be set-like their German counter-

parts hymning their nation-Deutsch-

land iiber alles-were the unknowing

victims of the 19th century myth: the

conviction that in an epoch of un-

precedented technological invention it

was still possible to pursue old-style

chauvinist interests without the risk of

catastrophe. The trap which the idea of

progress had set for them was that

their idea of the future was no more

than a projection of their past. They

had not read Edmund Burke who

wrote to a Member of the National

Assembly: You can never plan the

future from the past.

FUTURES February S7

Documents

Futures Volume 7 Issue 1 1975 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2875%2990034-8] I.F. Clarke -- 5. Any More for the Time Machine