News from Nowhere

A list of a hundred best novels has been circulating the Internet. What makes this one stand out among many similar lists is that it was compiled by an English literary critic Clement K. Shorter in 1898 and it contains many books that most people have never heard of. Tastes in books have changed greatly in a century, which explains some differences, but it has a lot to do with his method of selecting the books too.

Shorter accepted only one book per author and he didn’t select books from authors who were still alive. This excluded such great names as Jules Verne, Leo Tolstoy, and Mark Twain. The list is chronological so within it the books haven’t been given any preference. Often he has selected the first novel the author has written despite there being many better to select from.

While some books on the list have retained their value, many have completely disappeared. The oldest book on it, Don Quixote (1604), is still popular today. But Shorter had chosen delightfully many books written by women and many of them are among those that time has forgotten.

Although this blog is about the books that I have read, and I haven’t read most of those on Shorter’s list, I thought to go through it during the next few weeks. Not in detail though, and the emphasis will be on the books that I’ve actually read.

One of those is the last – and thereby the newest – book on the list, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891). It doesn’t often appear in modern equivalents. It was a relatively new book so perhaps it had novelty value. However, it was overshadowed at the time of its publication by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), a veritable bestseller. Morris’s book was written as an answer to Bellamy’s and the books are fairly similar so why the first was chosen over the latter is a mystery. Perhaps Shorter favoured his countryman, or maybe Bellamy, who died in May 1898, was still alive at the time the list was made and so was excluded.

News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest) is a socialist utopia set in 21st century London. The protagonist, William Guest (a clever name there) wakes up one morning to find himself in the future. He sets out to study his new surroundings and is very impressed by what he sees. Labour has ceased to be painful so people work joyously. Moreover, work is recycled so that people do both manual labour and creative tasks like writing poetry. Everyone is expected to do all kinds of work and they do it happily.

Morris’s utopian society is an idyllic place where the industrialisation has been stopped and the world has returned to a kind of pseudo medieval, agrarian society. Since the industry has ceased from polluting, the nature has recovered too; an important theme in the book. It’s possible to swim in the Thames, which was unheard of in Morris’s time. Beauty is valued above everything else, which isn’t surprising. Morris is best known today from his textiles and tapestries he patterned after a romanticised medieval ideal and that is evident in his utopia too.

It’s difficult to see why Morris’s book has ended up on the list. It’s written in the form of a medieval chivalric romance that must have seemed old-fashioned already a decade later. It’s not a terribly interesting book either. Perhaps the notion of a clean London has appealed to Shorter who had to suffer the worst consequences of British industrialism. Perhaps, only a decade after its publishing, Morris’s vision of the future seemed plausible. Or, it could be that Shorter simply liked the book. Whatever the reason, modern time has largely forgotten Morris’s book. Perhaps rightly so.

   

Unknown future - unseen sci-fi?

I’ve read sci-fi in bursts, never in any cohesive manner and not much in recent years. In my teens, whatever sci-fi book happened to catch my fancy when I visited the library was picked up and read. I don’t think half of it made an impact; I most certainly can’t remember most of it. If I recall correctly, the theme was interstellar travel and faraway planets, inspired by Star Wars, no doubt. Of those, Dune is the only one that has remained with me and that one mainly because my husband likes it so much.

The Tripods, on the other hand, made a lasting impression. Only a few books that I read depicted the earth in some distant future date, the idea so novel for me that I read the series a couple of times. I found it very scary and for a long time I feared alien invasion – though the TV series V may have had something to do with that too. I didn’t want to end up as a slave to some machine or a lizard. However, as I grew up, I lost the certainty that the earth would be invaded by extra-terrestrial beings and so that kind of sci-fi lost its power too.

As an adult, though, the sci-fi that has stayed with me the longest is the kind that depicts a dystopian future for our planet. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? both picture an overcrowded planet destroyed by a war or pollution, where natural resources are almost gone, the flora and fauna are extinct and most of the population live in slums. Big corporations dominate the world and democracy is non-existent. Dystopias did – and still do – seem like a plausible end for our present way of life.

At the time the books were written, Dick’s in 1968 and Gibson’s in 1984, the height of Cold War, a devastating war between two superpowers seemed likely. Cold War is long over and with it the threat of nuclear destruction, but the themes of over-population and overusing the earth’s resources haven’t gone away. And while 1992 didn’t see our planet populated by lifelike androids and the cyber space like Gibson imagined hasn’t truly actualised yet either, both books retain the sense of plausible in their predictions for the future.

The world has changed more since Neuromancer was published than it did between the publications of Dick’s and Gibson’s books. I read an article recently by John Gray titled What’s going to happen in the next hundred years? In it, he takes a look at the past century and concludes that after all the turmoil of the past hundred years, the world has returned to the state it was in at the end of the 19th century. With that he means that there isn’t a leading power that would control the planet, which makes things unpredictable. According to him, it makes a war inescapable. 

Gray’s notion would make the kind of future Dick and Gibson describe even more likely. However, I’d like to think it opens up the future, makes it unknown. The next hundred years don’t have to follow the lines of the past century; it could be different. And that offers possibilities for imagining a new kind of future in sci-fi too. The best sci-fi authors have always been able to depict unknown futures that seem possible, but they tend to be narrow in their scope. For all their brilliance in predicting the course of humanity, Dick and Gibson failed to take into account quite a lot of human issues.

Science fiction set in near future earth could tackle different themes than destruction or technological advance: women and sexual minorities, for example. Both groups are better off than they were a century ago – or at the time Dick and Gibson wrote their books. Surely we could imagine a future where things would be even better – or worse, in case of dystopias. Asia won’t necessarily be the leader of the world like Gibson depicts, but what would be the alternative? “The shift to unconventional energy may still be a game-changer, as the effect is to make the position of oil-producing countries increasingly untenable,” as Gray notes. Would that speak for a future where the planet hasn’t been destroyed?

The idea that we have returned to the beginning, cleaned our slate, is intriguing. It isn’t entirely true, of course, but for utopian writing, or dystopian, it offers endless possibilities. I, for one, would like to read those books. How about you?

Here’s the original trailer for Blade Runner, the movie based on Dick’s book.