Foreword: The Next Five Minutes
Departing from the idealistic and at times juvenile stories of new technologies and fantastical adventures in pulp science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astounding, the postwar period in the 20th century saw the emergence of a new type of science fiction (SF): social science fiction. The atrocities of totalitarianism and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War are harrowing evidence of the abuse of science. Blindly equating scientific discoveries with social progress has become improbable, if not dishonest.
In his 1953 article “Social Science Fiction”, modern SF pioneer Isaac Asimov proposed that there are three types of SF plots: gadget, adventure, and social science fiction. Unlike hard science fiction, meaning SF that contains elaborate details of either real or fictional scientific elements for the sake of accuracy, social science fiction is more concerned with the philosophical and ethical implications of science and technology on our human condition. Nevertheless, Asimov argues that even social science fiction has to retain the scientific spirit of SF. The impact of novum technology on our everyday lives has to be extrapolated from current innovations.
As economic prosperity and Cold War paranoia converged in developed Western societies, science fiction responded by offering critiques of consumerism, mass media, and conformity in the corporate workplace and suburban lifestyle. One of the most original postwar SF practitioners, J.G. Ballard, remarks, “I wanted to write about change and possibility. I wanted to write about the next five minutes, not the last thirty years, and the only form of fiction that had the vocabulary of ideas to deal with the next five minutes was science fiction…One had to look at the next five minutes to understand what was going on now.”
Galaxy Science Fiction first published in 1950 was a leading magazine that specialized in socially conscious SF short stories. One of its frequent contributors was Ray Bradbury, the celebrated American author best-known for his speculative (“what if” , “hypothetical”) fiction Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The novel’s diagnosis of daily life in a media-saturated world expands the potential of SF, from stories about emerging inventions to reflections on what it means to be human in technological environments, thereby consolidating its position as a seminal text in the genre.
Before Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, he worked out the basic premises of the novel in the short story “The Fireman” (1951). While the story references the ignominious tradition of book burning in human history, it is set in a future where books are banned and burned because they contradict, rather than conform to, the ideals of mainstream society. If we place the short story in the context of 1950s America, we could read it as a courageous rebuke of the xenophobia and bigotry of McCarthyism. The story is also a reflection on the future of art and culture, as digital media and entertainment overwhelm the senses, deaden affect, and fictionalize reality.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 today, one cannot help but marvel at Bradbury’s prescient imaginings of how technology, and above all, the people living with them, will be like. From the TV parlor’s 24/7 streaming of interactive soap operas and a domestic robot that butters your toast to the vicious policing Mechanical Beast, Bradbury presents a near future that promises endless happiness, abundance, and ubiquitous safety. But like the “the dead beast, the living beast” that relentlessly tracks and executes, the society of spectacle and overwork leaves individuals no time to reflect and to communicate, reducing them to the catatonic (Mildred) and the robotic (the firemen).
From Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), the use of futuristic technologies to disseminate sanctioned opinions and suppress dissent has long been a staple of dystopian SF. What makes Fahrenheit 451 memorable is Bradbury’s metaphors: the book as a burning dove, man as the book. The touch of drenched leather and cardboard, the smell of musty pages, and the book that pounds like a heartbeat against the chest convert Montag from a fireman who obeys and burns to a man who saves and keeps.
Ray Bradbury was also a prolific short story master. Among his 600 stories is “I Sing the Body Electric!” (1969), a precursor of today’s discussions on the benign and malign effects of artificial intelligence. In Fahrenheit 451, to become Plato’s Republic or Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden requires astonishing feats of memory and is prone to the all too human fallibility of forgetfulness. The store-bought and bespoke electrical grandma in “I Sing the Body Electric!” seems to be immune to memory loss. She is ageless and always robust. Grandma’s mind is likened to a beehive, suggesting her function as a hive mind that collects and records the thoughts and consciousnesses of her family members. She is also programmed to be a limitless encyclopedia, well-versed in all languages and disciplines. Paradoxically, it is grandma’s perfect memory that makes her less human. Throughout the story, grandma has to feign forgetfulness and mix up the names of the children deliberately to gain their trust. This brings to mind the need to program randomness in algorithms for personalized entertainment apps.
If the electrical grandma is compared to bees, then her family might be placing her in the subservient position of being kept for human use. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were first proposed in his story cycle I Robot. The laws continue to serve as the basic premise for our expectations of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In Asimov’s stories, humans occupy a superior position as creator-users, while the robots serve the interests of their human masters. In “I Sing the Body Electric!”, the humanoid grandma conforms to Asimov’s Three Laws as she protects her human granddaughter Agatha by sacrificing herself in a traffic accident. In the story, the structure of these laws reveals that humans are considered the most important beings, and their existence is prioritized over that of robots. The preservation of humans designated by the Three Laws reveals our anxieties about the threat of robot domination. In scientific and cultural debates today, it is still commonly believed that humans should rule over robots to keep them under control.
The electrical grandma also has the suprahuman ability to shape-shift according to the appearance of the person next to her. This is designed to create the impression of biological ties between the robot and her human family. While the miraculous and mysterious likeness to each child cheats their minds like optical illusions, this reinforces their man-machine kinship. Nevertheless, this ability could lead to nightmarish scenarios of stolen identities and manipulation. Similarly, the electrical grandma as a database of the innermost thoughts and feelings of her family could be abused for control and surveillance purposes, especially if the story was penned by Philp K. Dick instead.
As critics of algorithmic biases have pointed out, the robot’s opinions on what could and should be done are inevitably colored by the biases and assumptions of her creators. The electrical grandma is proud of her incorruptible nature and claims to be the ideal moral guide. Yet, the robot’s beliefs are programmed. In this sense, the electrical grandma is not an impartial model of acceptable thoughts and behavior. Despite the moral infallibility and immortality of the electrical grandma, her embodiment of perfection can be unsettling. What is even more disconcerting is the vision of a community of perfect human disciples of the robot. Intolerant of the slightest deviation from the prescriptive, the aspiration for uniform holiness may in the end breed bigotry and absolutism.
Ray Bradbury once said, “I’ve tried not to predict, but to protect and to prevent.” Science fiction remains a frontier for cautionary tales about the unfreedom of homogeneity that is all too often already in place.
In his 1953 article “Social Science Fiction”, modern SF pioneer Isaac Asimov proposed that there are three types of SF plots: gadget, adventure, and social science fiction. Unlike hard science fiction, meaning SF that contains elaborate details of either real or fictional scientific elements for the sake of accuracy, social science fiction is more concerned with the philosophical and ethical implications of science and technology on our human condition. Nevertheless, Asimov argues that even social science fiction has to retain the scientific spirit of SF. The impact of novum technology on our everyday lives has to be extrapolated from current innovations.
As economic prosperity and Cold War paranoia converged in developed Western societies, science fiction responded by offering critiques of consumerism, mass media, and conformity in the corporate workplace and suburban lifestyle. One of the most original postwar SF practitioners, J.G. Ballard, remarks, “I wanted to write about change and possibility. I wanted to write about the next five minutes, not the last thirty years, and the only form of fiction that had the vocabulary of ideas to deal with the next five minutes was science fiction…One had to look at the next five minutes to understand what was going on now.”
Galaxy Science Fiction first published in 1950 was a leading magazine that specialized in socially conscious SF short stories. One of its frequent contributors was Ray Bradbury, the celebrated American author best-known for his speculative (“what if” , “hypothetical”) fiction Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The novel’s diagnosis of daily life in a media-saturated world expands the potential of SF, from stories about emerging inventions to reflections on what it means to be human in technological environments, thereby consolidating its position as a seminal text in the genre.
Before Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, he worked out the basic premises of the novel in the short story “The Fireman” (1951). While the story references the ignominious tradition of book burning in human history, it is set in a future where books are banned and burned because they contradict, rather than conform to, the ideals of mainstream society. If we place the short story in the context of 1950s America, we could read it as a courageous rebuke of the xenophobia and bigotry of McCarthyism. The story is also a reflection on the future of art and culture, as digital media and entertainment overwhelm the senses, deaden affect, and fictionalize reality.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 today, one cannot help but marvel at Bradbury’s prescient imaginings of how technology, and above all, the people living with them, will be like. From the TV parlor’s 24/7 streaming of interactive soap operas and a domestic robot that butters your toast to the vicious policing Mechanical Beast, Bradbury presents a near future that promises endless happiness, abundance, and ubiquitous safety. But like the “the dead beast, the living beast” that relentlessly tracks and executes, the society of spectacle and overwork leaves individuals no time to reflect and to communicate, reducing them to the catatonic (Mildred) and the robotic (the firemen).
From Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), the use of futuristic technologies to disseminate sanctioned opinions and suppress dissent has long been a staple of dystopian SF. What makes Fahrenheit 451 memorable is Bradbury’s metaphors: the book as a burning dove, man as the book. The touch of drenched leather and cardboard, the smell of musty pages, and the book that pounds like a heartbeat against the chest convert Montag from a fireman who obeys and burns to a man who saves and keeps.
Ray Bradbury was also a prolific short story master. Among his 600 stories is “I Sing the Body Electric!” (1969), a precursor of today’s discussions on the benign and malign effects of artificial intelligence. In Fahrenheit 451, to become Plato’s Republic or Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden requires astonishing feats of memory and is prone to the all too human fallibility of forgetfulness. The store-bought and bespoke electrical grandma in “I Sing the Body Electric!” seems to be immune to memory loss. She is ageless and always robust. Grandma’s mind is likened to a beehive, suggesting her function as a hive mind that collects and records the thoughts and consciousnesses of her family members. She is also programmed to be a limitless encyclopedia, well-versed in all languages and disciplines. Paradoxically, it is grandma’s perfect memory that makes her less human. Throughout the story, grandma has to feign forgetfulness and mix up the names of the children deliberately to gain their trust. This brings to mind the need to program randomness in algorithms for personalized entertainment apps.
If the electrical grandma is compared to bees, then her family might be placing her in the subservient position of being kept for human use. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were first proposed in his story cycle I Robot. The laws continue to serve as the basic premise for our expectations of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In Asimov’s stories, humans occupy a superior position as creator-users, while the robots serve the interests of their human masters. In “I Sing the Body Electric!”, the humanoid grandma conforms to Asimov’s Three Laws as she protects her human granddaughter Agatha by sacrificing herself in a traffic accident. In the story, the structure of these laws reveals that humans are considered the most important beings, and their existence is prioritized over that of robots. The preservation of humans designated by the Three Laws reveals our anxieties about the threat of robot domination. In scientific and cultural debates today, it is still commonly believed that humans should rule over robots to keep them under control.
The electrical grandma also has the suprahuman ability to shape-shift according to the appearance of the person next to her. This is designed to create the impression of biological ties between the robot and her human family. While the miraculous and mysterious likeness to each child cheats their minds like optical illusions, this reinforces their man-machine kinship. Nevertheless, this ability could lead to nightmarish scenarios of stolen identities and manipulation. Similarly, the electrical grandma as a database of the innermost thoughts and feelings of her family could be abused for control and surveillance purposes, especially if the story was penned by Philp K. Dick instead.
As critics of algorithmic biases have pointed out, the robot’s opinions on what could and should be done are inevitably colored by the biases and assumptions of her creators. The electrical grandma is proud of her incorruptible nature and claims to be the ideal moral guide. Yet, the robot’s beliefs are programmed. In this sense, the electrical grandma is not an impartial model of acceptable thoughts and behavior. Despite the moral infallibility and immortality of the electrical grandma, her embodiment of perfection can be unsettling. What is even more disconcerting is the vision of a community of perfect human disciples of the robot. Intolerant of the slightest deviation from the prescriptive, the aspiration for uniform holiness may in the end breed bigotry and absolutism.
Ray Bradbury once said, “I’ve tried not to predict, but to protect and to prevent.” Science fiction remains a frontier for cautionary tales about the unfreedom of homogeneity that is all too often already in place.
Profile:
Carolyn Lau teaches and researches science fiction literature and film, graphic narratives, and posthumanism at the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her first monograph, Posthuman Myths in the Novels of J.G. Ballard, will be published by Routledge in 2022.
