by Judith Merril
Once upon a time, in the shining years of the youth movements, the time of turning on and tuning in, the days of draft dodgers and deserters and Fuller domes, first moon landings, and Whole Earth Catalogues, there was a high rise building in Toronto called Rochdale College: a "free university", student-owned and run, dedicated to a concept of education that had everything to do with learning and almost nothing to do with teaching. The elder members, like me —anyone over 35 was an elder— were not Professors, but "Resource Persons". It was a good place to be, for a while; and of course, it lasted only a short while. But for a few years, Rochdale was a moiling boiling collective centre for people — artists, social scientists, planners, politicos—trying to create (yes!) a truly new world order, to carve the future to a shape and in a substance better suited to the planet and its humans than the painful present we were experiencing, let alone what we knew of the past.
Most of the people at Rochdale read science fiction.
The Rochdale building is now a senior citizens' residence, and I, for one, am now a senior citizen. The Space Race fell off the pop charts long before the US-USSR wargames (and the Soviet Union itself) collapsed, and the liberation generation students of the 60s and 70s are now mostly struggling with middle-age middle-class mortgages and migraines. The new youth are addicted to nostalgia instead of novelty, and prefer medieval fantasy to speculative future fiction.
The future seems to be on hold.
I came to Rochdale in 1968 from a fairly cushy spot in the world of US science fiction— a world that was just then in the process of exploding out of a dirty-little-genre ghetto into both literary and commercial respectability. I came to Rochdale, and for that matter to Canada, for the same reason I have invested the largest part of my adult life in speculative fiction: I wanted to change the world.
I still want to change the world. We are supposed to get over that as we "mature". Perhaps I just got old without maturing. (No mortgages, no migraines.) The longer I live, the more urgently, the more thoroughly the world seems to need changing—in wider, deeper and more demanding dimensions. At thirteen, when this lifelong obsession was just seizing upon me, I had sure simplistic/socialist goals of reshaping the political economy, establishing social justice and eliminating war as a game for powerfreaks and hunger as a byproduct of profiteering. At thirty, I was beginning to think it might be at least as urgent to open our eyes and mouths and bodies to sensory awareness and full communication potentials. At sixty, I was no longer willing to indulge in triage politics and sociology: all logic insists that food for the belly comes first; yet people still die of hunger for love, dignity, "honor" and simple human contact; still others are killed for refusing to starve, or suppress, their minds.
Now I approach three-score-and-ten, and in the past decade many of us Earthlings have come to understand that all our hungers, honors and ailments may be irrelevant in view of the damage inflicted by humanity on Gaia, the earth, the planet from which our very lives derive, and without which we can not as yet survive.
Somewhere in this progression, I seem to have lost the personal compulsion to make my statement through science fiction. Perhaps it was just the suspicion that any medium both profitable and respectable can hardly be subversive. Perhaps the fancy-dress, the masque, of fiction now seems too frivolous: we are living in truly terrifying times, where utopias become literally inconceivable and the visibility ahead is closing down to zero.
Many—most—of my generation of science fiction writers seem to have succumbed to the same malaise. Some of the best have moved to writing (splendid, and sometimes, some ways, still speculative) mainstream mimetic fiction; others have turned clear around to write (clever, delightful) historical "what-if s." Most, sadly, have acceded to the bottom-line blandishments of mass-market publication and now write endless formularized sequels, sets, and set-in-the-world-of read-alikes.
The future is on hold?
Not quite.
This Ark of Ice has no solutions, few fine visions or vistas; but it is blessedly full of the seeds of discontent, of finely visualized delineations of problems for which we have little or no precedent and small scope for understanding. Some of these stories are simply refinements of by-now "standards" of SF, but many others are probing attempts to expose new realities at the center of life-and-death decisions we must, very soon, find the energy and acumen to deal with.
The questions that come at us here have much to do with bio-technology, the new or imminent ethics and practices that relate to birth and death and sustenance in a changed and changing set of ecological equations. But, equally, they deal with the technology—both electronic and psychological — of control and decision-making. And, finally, with the act of perception itself: how do we penetrate the multi-veils of illusion (education, media, tradition, authority, sciencism, mysticism, high-tech glitz) so as to perceive the (real?) problems?
If future fiction cannot, or does not, at this juncture show us a way forward, perhaps it can at least illuminate some barriers and byways: point us toward explorations of new paths to hope — or to as-yet undefined hazards.
Unless we can find and move through or around the obstacles we have set in the paths we already know, the future will no longer be on hold; it will be out of service.