FUTURE TENSE #12: 2001, by God!
© 2000 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved
I'm somewhat amazed to discover just how amazed I am to have made it to 2001.
I was born a few years after Hiroshima, so I'm of the generation for whom Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film of that name proverbially represented the distant future. "Boomers," we're called. I first saw the movie at twenty. I remember working the math in my head as I left the theatre, and realizing I'd have to live past fifty in order to see the real 2001.
And I recall concluding that would probably never happen.
Not because I anticipated poor health. I was myself so flush with youth and strength that for me their inevitable decay was still only an abstract intellectual concept, as hypothetical as 2001 itself. As things have turned out, I am now older than my mother ever got to be...but I knew nothing of that in 1968. And yet I more than half expected to be gone before 2001 rolled around. Why?
Well, because I expected that almost everybody would be gone by then.
And so did most of my contemporaries, whether they still remember it or not. We confidently expected atomic Armageddon. And nothing less, either. I'm not talking about exchange of a few ICBMs, casualties in the hundreds of millions, a few cities uninhabitable for a century or so--long before Carl Sagan and others gave it a name, we expected Nuclear Winter itself. The end of humanity, for sure, and possibly even the sterilization of Terra.
Everyone felt that way. Everyone sophisticated enough to give the future any thought, at least. It's hard to remember now, perhaps because it's not something we like remembering. Deep down, a whole generation expected the End of Everything to arrive, and soon--if you didn't understand that much, you weren't bright enough to be worth talking to; you probably still believed in Santa Claus.
Some of us actually yearned for apocalypse. And not just the religious zealots, who welcomed nuclear firestorm as God's punishment on the wicked and the heathen, a long-overdue Second Flood. Even the rational started to think that maybe we might as well get it over with. There was a strain of what was then called "post-holocaust" science fiction (Nazi-survivors had not yet claimed exclusive use of the word "Holocaust"), and one branch of it suggested the horror ahead might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, a necessary pruning, a culling of the flock. It would certainly teach technological civilization the error of its ways, in no uncertain terms, and at the same time conveniently remove the enormous mass of people that made technological civilization an utter necessity. Those lucky enough to live through it and competent enough in Darwinian terms to survive its aftermath might then build a new Eden together, powered by windmills and waterwheels and ruled only by nice people.
We did not, quite, all despair--thank God. We clung to hope, some of us anyway; we cherished its embers and fanned them into flame when we could. I became a science fiction writer four years after I first saw 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in part because I hoped that if I could only imagine enough happy futures, loudly enough, maybe someone would get confused and build one for me. But nearly every SF story about the future written during that period--that is, most of the SF ever written, including my own--contained, somewhere within it, some equivalent of the phrase, "...assuming we don't blow ourselves up, first." Rare was the fictional universe without at least one burned-out planet bearing mute evidence of a technological civilization which had failed the nuclear test and destroyed itself.
The only thing as obvious as the Armageddon problem itself was that it was utterly intractable. The Cold War was permanent, eternal. Capitalism and communism could never ever coexist. The Evil Empire's commissars would never yield as long as there was a single peasant left to sacrifice. Neither would the equally evil swine who protected us from them, the bloodthirsty baby-killing military-industrial complex. Mutual Assured Destruction was inherently unstable, an accident waiting to happen. Hope was all very well, denial was a perfectly workable strategy for living. But to actually believe you'd see the next millennium was as crazy as...oh, I don't know, as crazy as believing South Africa might ever give up apartheid. Or dreaming that smallpox, still the all-time champion slayer of human beings then, could somehow be eradicated forever. Or expecting equal rights for women anytime soon. Or anticipating a meaningful European Union. Pie in the sky stuff.
And so we mostly ignored 2001's story--the silly idea that technology might actually bring us closer to our creators, that perhaps gods do live in the sky after all--and we focused on its most memorable feature: the mind-bending plunge through a space warp at the end. That sequence has been quoted, or stolen if you prefer, by at least a dozen movies since (most recently THE CELL), and nobody who's seen it ever forgets it. It's a magnificent metaphor for the way the future comes at us: much too fast, way too bright and gaudy, a confusing flood of images that race by too fast to comprehend. I have days when I feel I'm trapped in that cinematic sequence, and I bet you have, too.
The real 2001 has turned out to be somewhat less wonderful than Clarke's fictional one. We do not have a meaningful presence on the Moon yet, and there are no manned expeditions to Jupiter planned. On the other hand, the laborious and expensive phonecall Heywood Floyd makes to Kubrick's daughter would today be direct-dialed and dirt cheap. Modern mainframes can deal with contradiction without going insane. And the Cold War ended peacefully--perhaps the first war in history to do so.
2001 was once the far future for us Boomers--and now that the real thing has arrived, I hope history will remember us, despite our name, as the generation that could have made very big booms indeed, had many excuses to, and did not do so once. It was a great Millennium: we got out of it alive. On to the next!
