Prophets
In watching fire raging across Europe, fleeing residents, and the smoking devastation left behind, I find it impossible not to think of David Mitchell’s stark characterisation of our planet at some unspecified time in the future as uninhabitable in large tracts, with androids manufactured in varying degrees of sun-resistance, allowing them to work outside in conditions that would see humans burnt to a crisp: ‘Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata [the poor] can’t buy the drugs necessary to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northwards at forty kilometres per year.’ This is the hideous truth described by sentient android Sonmi-451.
This is not the only respect in which Cloud Atlas, first published in 2004, is extraordinarily prescient. The middle class is largely distracted from the environmental disaster through life in the safe zone, where the ubiquitous malls offer endless – and compulsory – consumption, including readily available ‘face-scaping’: just flick through a catalogue and decide what you’d like to look like next. Age is indeed just a number when you can renew your complexion endlessly.
Mitchell saw it all back in the earliest years of the noughties, including the inexorable rise of Korea as a dominant force in world trade and culture.
But perhaps even more remarkable in its predictions is Marge Piercy’s classic, Woman on the Edge of Time, which is more than a quarter of a century older than David Mitchell’s masterpiece. Her dystopian vision of synthetic femininity is incarnate all around us. Meet Gildina the contracty, fashioned entirely to appeal to the male gaze and contracted to provide sex for a middle-ranking technician. ‘The woman’s hair, stippled mauve and platinum, was arranged in an intricate tower of curls and small gewgaws, dripping pearls like a wedding dress. She wore a long dress of slippery substance that changed colour as she moved and emitted a tinkling sound; it was slit way up the side and cut out here and there so that her breasts occasionally peeked out or her navel appeared and reappeared…Her stomach was flat but her hips and buttocks were oversized and audaciously curved . She looked as it she could hardly walk for the extravagance of her breasts and buttocks…’
Not that it’s all bad. Piercy also predicted the Smartwatch, known in her novel as a ‘kenner’, which can tell you all you need to know and connect you to anyone anywhere. We are still waiting, though, for her Garden of Eden to materialise: a world in which each individual is allowed to pursue their own interests and potential in return for enough collective effort to sustain the community, personal possessions are few because most property is shared, and no one is left behind. Sadly, this idyll is under constant attack from reactionary forces, and regular tours of duty on defence are needed to safeguard it.
Margaret Attwood was quick to remind us that she had not included in The Handmaid’s Tale anything that had not already occurred somewhere at some time, and as restrictive abortions measures grow in several countries and the trad wife trend shows no sign of receding any time soon, you have to wonder what other predictions from dystopian fiction we may have to face. Please let it not be the entirely random underground incarceration from Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men…