Pop culture of the pop future

Pop culture is an almost inexhaustible source of divergent delusions (to use the title of a famous anthology on K. Dick published by Casterman) about our future. DeBoeck is publishing a small booklet entitled Are we living in science fiction? by Mark Brake, a science popularizer and obviously in love with this pop culture.

Taking up all the great classical themes, space, time, machines, Brake takes us on a passionate journey through the works of cinema and literature. We rediscover the intriguing human destiny directed for an ancient consciousness in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the popular manifestations of world-opening devices like the Tardis from the legendary Dr. Who, or the Voight-Kampff test, a sort of emotional and tortured replicant version of the Turing test.

Our hopes and fears, the apocalypse, aging and death or precognition have all been widely explored in science fiction, a novel of hypotheses according to Maurice Renard. One small regret: the book stops each time at the exact moment when our mind starts to be intrigued and would like the exploration to go on, leaving a taste of unfinished business. Let’s take the example of precognition, or at least the ability to anticipate events before they happen: stopping at Minority Report, the story of precogs able to anticipate crimes, with a high-speed overview of Matrix definitely does not pay homage to the question, explored among others, through psychohistory by Asimov, or through stochastics by Silverberg, references that are well worth the detour.

Let’s not sulk in our pleasure, we have here a kind of catalog that we can use as such to arouse our curiosity. We then discover or rediscover how rich and varied science fiction anticipation literature is and how it proposes to question our future, our technologies, the nature of our thoughts and our consciousnesses, and the fate of the human species. Not so insignificant or anecdotal after all!