How I found the Future - Part II
The echoes of war - How to make the future different from the past
Warning: This article contains a disturbing image of war injury from Ernst Friedrich's book "War Against War" (1924). Friedrich published these images to show what war does to human beings. I show it for the same reason.
I grew up during the cold war. It was a cold war, but it was still a war. It was cold. The cold seeped into adults and children, leeched on conversations and love relationships, bogged down architecture, literature and film. The Cold War took something away from each human being. It dressed him in an invisible uniform.
The dystopian future had come today.
I left the Cold War.
I left it for space.
My father had thousands and thousands of books. They rose in architectural progression shelves over shelves to the heights of human imagination. Their spines were colorful, others were black, many were serious, some elegant and others nonchalant or ironic and when you stood before these rising walls of books you heard them speak, each in its own voice.
The Cold War was not as mysterious as Johne le Carré would have us believe. It was a bureaucratic distribution of threat, a slow motion imminent extinction and just one red button press away from nuclear inferno.
The Cold War was bureaucratic and merciless as a corporate ladder and just as gray.
Soviet tanks stood less than 30 miles from my home town Vienna. If the Cold War were to turn hot they would be here within 2 hours. That was only the first problem. The bigger problem would be the counter strike of our own side. It would be nuclear and none of us would survive.
We were living on a battlefield.
The Man in the Armored Spacesuit
I was the man in the armored, black spacesuit on the cover of Alfred Bester’s “The Star are our destination” - retitled in the German translation as “The Revenge of the Cosmonaut”.
His universe was a fireball of explosions. It was as if he were flying through the center of a star and he was surviving. The subtitle suggested that this last survivor of the spaceship Nomad had to - if he wanted to survive - defeat the universe.
He would survive.
How could I be like him survive the coming nuclear fireball? Where could I get such an armored spacesuit?
Why we children were hated by the older generations
I only understood much later why we children were so much hated by the older generations. Why they stared at us with those malevolent eyes and their cruel mouths tightened to thin line just because we were there and because we were there we seemed to be out of place.
Later I understood that they were not in the same world as we were. They were stuck in that old war that for us had never happened. I knew now that it had taken place. I was playing in its bomb craters. But for a child noting really exists that happened before its birth. It was as if the world had just come into existence when it began to breathe.
Wars never ended with the armistice. For many, they go on until their death. Those zombies of the war remembered how their personal lives were taken from them in exchange for ideology.
That bitter, old man that cursed us might have come back from war a broken man. Eastern front and then 10 years of Soviet gulag after the war ended. That evil, old woman that broke my glider plane when it dropped on her balcony may have lost her son and her husband in the war and shrank into a bitter, resenting harpy.
They had lost everything. They were the witnesses of the end.
What were we children doing there then? Why were we running about joyfully and laughing our heads off as if nothing had happened? And their eyes tightened and their lips compressed to a thin line that said: this far and no further.
It was a dystopian world.
I needed distance.
Lightyears of it.
The first spaceport
Space began in the left bedroom book case second shelf from the bottom and went up higher than my lego spaceships would fly without the help of a chair to step on. The planets of the science fiction space were Robert A. Heinlein with “Tunnel to the Stars”, Arthur C. Clarke with “2001 - A Space Odyssey”, Alfred Bester with “The Demolished Man”, Isaac Asimov with his robot stories, A E Van Vogt, Harry Harrison and many others.
Their worlds were dangerous, never dystopian. Mankind was in danger, fought and lost and won and lost again. They were never doomed. Fighting spirit and an idea of what tomorrow could be dominated.
When the future is like the past
“War against War” by Ernst Friedrich was the most terrifying portrait of war through portraits of men who war had turned into living corpses. It is an underworld of suffering that shows faces destroyed by injuries that seem impossible to survive. But they live, are condemned to live with faces that no longer look like faces because the faces have been shot off, the eyes gouged, parts of the skull blown away. It was the most terrifying book I had ever seen.
In Ernst Jünger’s “Storm of Steel” the hero physically survives years of impossible to survive carnage. In the last scene pronounces the end of the war but he does not rejoice his survival. He is just there and everything around him has lost its meaning.
This did not stop the slaughter. Images of terror causes man to just look away and think it would not happen to him and statistically he was right. On a grand scale a negative impetus, moving away from something does not work well
The Process of Creation: Stanislaw Lem
I was in the audience when Stanislaw Lem read at a cafe in Vienna:
”… and the space ship would approach the planet and go into orbit and the astronauts would not know what they would find on that new world. I would not know, either but I wanted to know. I would explore the planet with my astronauts”
It was his process of creation from the perspective of the human being, the deeply humanist approach that let history and politics out as the poison it was. He left behind the German occupation and the Soviet occupation that had turned his home country Poland into a puppet state of the Soviet empire.
Science fiction is the literature that explores the future
Stanislaw Lem discovered new worlds through the travels of his astronauts. Humans can only develop with a bright future in their mind. A man dying of thirst finds the power of survival in the thought of water, not in images of his death.
The past of never-ending wars and misery is a consequence of the habit of history. History is a pseudo-science that serves politics, hiding its manipulation of facts by curation, arrangement and commentary behind walls of pedestrian footnotes. This demon can only be exorcised by by the force of human dignity.
A future, different from the past can be created on the foundation of the bright image of a future high civilization that is dedicated to exploration, discovery, knowledge and creation of beauty and wisdom.
Exorcising the evil of history with literature
Humanism is the foundation of a good future of mankind. Its foundation are the classic ideals of virtue and responsibility, expressed through philosophy and literature, imagined by art and architecture and music and technology. At its core is the dignity of man.
The current human as a cog in the machine ideology is the expression of the anti-humanist collectivist ideologies of fascism, communism, corporatism and the kind of democracy corrupted by political parties (which were not part of the foundation of the United States of America).
Literature is truthful as the pseudo science of history can never be. Literature makes it clear who tells the story and from which angle. It does not hide but expressively demonstrate its premises and perspective through the voices of the hero, the narrator and the author and sometimes through all three of them.
Science fiction is the literature of the future and has a liberating effect - as long as you stay away from depressive, dystopian works. That much of science fiction is not good is not an argument. Most books are not good. Literature is only represented by its best - just as true science is.
The state of absolute happiness
A human being searching for light finds it in literature, science fiction and other genres. This is how I have found the future and how I will work to make the future different from the past.
Mankind has a mission to explore the universe, to defeat is own weaknesses and achieve a state of supreme wisdom and knowledge which is the state of absolute happiness. This happiness will radiate throughout the universe from our matured, interstellar civilization.