Speculative fiction isn't prophetic — or at least not in the sense of predicting, in detail, what will actually happen. That goes exponentially for filmed speculative fiction, which leaves no time to ponder between sentences, little opportunity to back up and reread a passage. Instead, it uses a perspective shift to think about something in the present, ranging from destruction of multiple civilizations through misunderstanding and a hubristic desire to enlighten (e.g., Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1995)) to use of utopian/dystopian tropes to comment on present social structure (more examples than I can conveniently count)1 to the continued power of the Rule of Names — that names have and grant power over people and concepts — in even relatively-near-future "pure science fiction" stories (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, The Diary of the Rose (1976)).
Sometimes, however…
| CMDR LEVITT | Captain, I wasn't about to let Captain Hall get the rest of my crew killed defending [President] Clark's policies. I happen to disagree with those policies, but that doesn't mean I agree with your actions, either. It's not the role of the military to make policy. |
|---|---|
| CAPT SHERIDAN | Our mandate is to "defend Earth against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Now Clark has become that enemy. Your oath is to the [Earth] Alliance and to the people back home, not to any particular government.3 |
| CAPT MACDOUGAN | You're splittin' the hair mighty thin, John. |
| CAPT SHERIDAN | Am I? Night Watch. Ministry of Peace. Ministry of Truth. Is this the same Alliance that you joined, or has it become something else? The orders you've been getting — do they represent the ideals of the Alliance… or of a dictatorship? You've been ordered to open fire on civilian targets! Is this what you signed on for?
• • • • I'd like you to join us. We'll kick out Clark, and the Night Watch, and the rest of that bunch, and we'll turn it over to the voters. Let them decide if what we did was right or wrong! Because in the final analysis, those are the people we work for. |
| No Surrender, No Retreat, Babylon-5 (Seas. 4 Ep. 15, 26 May 1997) at 37:42 et seq.. | |
…those comments do have uncomfortable predictive value, often playing out in headlines and soundbites and social-media nonsense. The less said about what happens well out of public awareness, probably the better — if only because verification would be impossible without betraying at minimum personal confidences.
One final note to ponder: Voters make mistakes, too, especially when influenced by the Big Lie and/or believing that they can choose only a lesser evil. The alternative — as the course of history illustrates — is almost inevitably worse, and perhaps especially so when an electoral loser foments insurrection.
- From a classical-logic perspective, both utopian and dystopian fictions operate by exaggeration. In that sense, they form the fourth type of speculative fiction, with significant overlaps with at least one of the other types, usually science fiction. See, e.g., George Orwell, 1984 (1949); see also, e.g., Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (ser. 1982–85); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888).
The logical landmine in utopian/dystopian fiction is that the means by which the society depicted has been constructed seldom get more than a paragraph — and in the exceptional instances that do pay attention to means of transformation, everything is an off-stage fait d'accompli. Even those epistolic passages in 1984 from Emmanuel Goldstein's "treatise" are mere theory. The actual events appear nowhere, and certainly not with any detail comparable to even a synopsis.
- See generally James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890); see also Ursula K. Le Guin, The Rule of Names (1964). I think that's enough distracting literary theory for the moment.
- It is entirely not a coincidence that this oath tracks that of American officers… both military and others. But that is about as close as B5 ever gets to discussing the means by which that universe came to be; at most, there's a presumption of future American hegemony, which was all too plausible two years after the First Gulf War while the Soviet Union was breaking up into its historical antecedants, reflected further in titles, ranks, and monolinguism. Not to mention that it was on American TV.