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Monday, March 13, 2006
The Recreated World: A Research Question
While reading this article about the prospects of a nuclear Iran, I noted that Kennedy estimated the odds of a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Event as “‘’between 1 in 3 and even.”
Using either that or some other potential apocalypse, can you think of fictional scenarios in which the world is somehow recreated as it would be imagined to be, through simulation technology or similar, and a character recognizes that the true life is absent? Not The Matrix, more like The Man in the High Castle in that the disaster has to be a counterfactual real.
Comments
A poor quality example would be J.G. Ballard’s *Hello America*. Here we have a world devasted by climate change and other natural disasters, resulting in the transformation of the US into a desert. A group of explorers land in New York, make their way westward and come across a tropical paradise in Las Vegas. The leader of the new US is none other than Charles Manson. Conceptually, the book is interesting, and at some level I think it’s meant to be a total farce. But it comes off as the worst sort of pulp sci-fi novel, with none of the brilliant abstract prose that characterizes, say, *Crash*. Less “new novel” and more pastiche without a cause. What could have been a fabulous take on American exceptionalism, on “Citee on a Hill” and Manifest Destiny discourses, ends up just plain silly.
A better version of this is Steve Erickson’s *Arc d’x*. I’ve been recommending this work for years, but Erickson is mostly neglected as too artsy for sci-fi folks and too sci-fi for artsy folks. Plus, Scott might have a problem with Erickson’s monological prose style, a kind of pomo Poe-ish voice. (Brian Evanson takes a lot from the Erickson fake book.) Any way, Erickson’s novel begins with the Sally Hemmings/Thos Jefferson affair, and wonders what if Hemmings had secured her libery and pursuit of happiness at the expense of her slave master’s life. Jump ahead to a near future, to an America that is very much the city on a hill run by a theocracy that has erased all of history. Basically, the novel explores the internal contradictions of Jeffersonian ideals, the way life, liberty, and pleasure don’t quite come hand in hand.
Not sure if I understand the question perfectly, but there is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the ship is caught in a “time loop” that runs over and over again (the world is “recreated” each time). Only Data, the android, is able to recognize this and extract everyone from a universe of eternal reruns. I don’t remember the name of the episode, but perhaps someone else will.
RJO
I wonder if AI: Artificial Intelligence might fit the bill. It opens with stuff about a global warming-induced deluge wiping out most of the world’s population & that is instantly gearshifted down to nuclear family level where depopulation is reproduced but via a disease something like cancer (same eco-disaster continuum?)
The robot kid of course wants to feel real. The end of the movie he accepts fantasy and illusion.
Or what about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent ‘returns’ to the reconstructed Earth?
Does counterfactual real imply an alternative past, or could it also describe an unexpected or unforeseen future stemming from the past & present as we know it?
The former, I believe.
Well, there’s Charles Stross’ “A Colder War“... maybe… Though of course it’s more of a counterfactual irreal.
Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is set in an alternate universe, and the main character repeatedly gets visions how things “should” be—namely, how they are in our world. Nabokov’s Ada has a similar structure, although the narrator there never fully realizes that his world is imaginary. But neither one of these books is post-apocalyptic--he origins of the alternate realities in both are obscure--so I don’t know if they’re useful for you.
I wonder if Woman On the Edge of Time would qualify.
The Lathe of Heaven?
Thanks for all the suggestions. Many but not all of these books were familiar but not previously considered--Ada in particular is an intriguing example. I believe those episodes were titled “Anecdote is the Plural of Data.”