About
At a public lecture series on art in Los Angeles in 1990 “three out of five urban planners agreed that they hoped that someday Los Angelas would look like the film Bladerunner…It Has become a paradigm for the future of cities, for artists across the disciplines. This despite the fact that Dick’s Los Angela is bleak, full of kipple and inequalities, highly stratified, and quite frighteningly violent “Fiction is becoming reality” (Kitchen and Kneale, 2001, 20). But in mediated, and sometimes unexpected, ways.
(Jutta Weldes in To Seek Out New Worlds, 2003)
Welcome to “This was the Future”, a forum for speculative fabulations of the nearly (im)possible future.
In every vision of the future there are distinct trends which coordinate activity- human or not. Our aim is to isolate and analyse these trends. Every work of fiction/forecasting has origins in domestic themes, speculative works thus are “projected dislocations” of our own existence. Quoth Suvin…
“Science Fiction presents syntagmatically developed possible worlds, as models (more precisely as thought experiments) or as totalising and thematic metaphors” (Darko Suvin)
Not arbitrary signposting, but extrapolation and estrangement.
“Man must create his own future himself. History will not do it for him…it is in this atmosphere that structural fabulation draws its breath, responding to these conditions of being, in the form of extrapolative narrative” (John Huntington)
Given that most forms of fiction then are “extrapolations” of current conditions, how far along the road are we toward the “future” as defined by such writers as George Orwell and Phillip K. Dick, such films as Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell, and cult classics such as Red Dwarf, Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars and Futurama. For those of you asking “This was the future, where’s my fucking jetpack? Where’s my flying car? Where’s my alien/monkey/cyborg hand?”. This was the future aims at assessing these fabled fables, investigating the possibility in possible worlds, and tracking the progression of progress.
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‘This was the future’ is edited by Thao Phan (aka Thao Zissou), all comments/queries/criticisms are welcome at:
Thiswasthefuture@gmail.com
