decade that permits us to do the

following :
o to place the greatest emphasis on
moniioring technology as it de-
velops and in situ ; achieving this
objective requires a broad pro-
gramme of experimentation, assess-
ment, and indicator design.
a to increase greatly the level of
public participation and involve-
ment in technology assessment;
the major issues are political and
social, not technological, and thus
the interplay of values and prefer-
ences is paramount for effective
social choice.
0 to approach the understanding of
technology and society with both
nerve and humility, undertak-
ing a wise exploration of tech-
nological alternatives with a keen
sense of the limits of the tools of
forecasting, planning, and analysis.
From Prophecy
A seriahsed survey ot the movement
to Prediction
of ideas, developments in predictive
fiction, and first attempts to forecast
the future scientificall<
9. Ideal worlds and ideal wars: 1870-1914
I. F. Clarke
IF THE futurologists of the world ever
unite-and there is an expectation of
this in some recent science fiction
stories-then they will no doubt look
about them for a badge, seal, or
heraldic shield to manifest their cor-
porate identity. And if the futurolo-
gists follow in the worthy tradition
established in 1439 by the Drapers
Company in the City of London, then
their blazon will probably read: Azure
three mushroom clouds issuing from
three sunbursts gules and beneath the
words, If we had only ktiown !
This is a way of suggesting that
futurologists should look backward
before they begin to look forward, so
that they may learn how all too easy it
is to follow the graphs of hopes and
fears to their apparent conclusions on
the delights or disasters of the future.
1. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department of
English Studies, University of Strathclyde. He
received the Pilgrim Award for 1974 from the
Science Fiction Research Association ofAmerica
in recognition of his contributians to the field.
For this reason the articIes in this series
have examined those developments in
the past that have had a major effect
upon the emergent practice of fore-
casting; and the authors have, in
particular, looked into the frame of
reference that gave bearings and direc-
tions to the prophecies and predictions
of the last hundred years. In their
different ways three expert writers1
have shown how the dominant images-
ideas, beliefs, aspirations, and anxieties
--of past periods have been decisive in
projecting their own characteristic per-
spectives into the desert regions of
time-to-come. This is to say that the
frame of reference-the mass of assump-
tions in any period-is a subtle instru-
ment for the deception of mankind.
For we live rather like the prisoners in
Platos cave, ever observing the acti-
vities of our times as they are projected
upon the blank screen of the future and
ever uncertain that these shadows of
coming things will become the realities
of tomorrows world.
FUTURES Dec ember I S75
There is an intimate connection
between the myths of the Western
societies and the ritual acts of their
science fiction stories, the moral deeds
of their imaginary wars, the paradisal
state of their future utopias, and the
expectations of their forecasters. The
evidence of these various modes of
apprehending the potentialities of any
technological society shows that, as
soon as the idea of the future became a
major element in Western thinking
about 1870, the many visions of the
things-to-come began to establish an
accepted pattern of contemporary ex-
pectations.
The modern world had begun about
1870 with the battles of the Franco-
German War and the proclamation of
the German Reich in the Galerie des
Giaces at Versailles. At the same time
the characteristic modern attitude to
the future appeared quite suddenly and
most clearly in the technological
marvels Verne described in Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870,
in the worldwide interest in Chesneys
notorious tale of future warfare in the
Battle of Do&kg of 1871, in Bulwer-
Lyttons famous account of evolu-
tionary developments in The Coming
Race of 1871, and in Jokai Mors
description of an advanced techno-
logical society in his J&6 &z&ad
Regenye of 1872. One hundred years ago
a new kind of prophetic, popular
literature had appeared almost over-
night in response to the universal
interest in the shape of things-to-come;
and the expectations of the new pro-
phets ran true to the beliefs and
experiences of their times-in future
wars that reflected the colonising and
expansionist policies of the great powers,
in ideal states that began with an
unquestioning faith in the continued
advance of a benign technology, and in
a constant rate of social improvement.
The cardinal principle, common to the
imaginary wars and the ideal states,
was the conviction that the major
technological nations of the nineteenth
century would still be deciding the
future of the world in the twenty-first
century.
Although the aggressive nationalism
and the ferocious ideologies of the
imaginary wars may seem to have
nothing in common with the more
pacific plans for the world state of the
future, they were undoubtedly part of
the search for the happy life that was a
major characteristic of futuristic fiction
on both sides of the Atlantic before the
outbreak of the First World War.
These stories of the future displayed
an obsessive self-interest and an im-
mense self-assurance that worked with
equal effect both in describing the most
favoured future for the most favoured
nation and in forecasting the spec-
tacular social advances to be expected
in the better worlds of the coming
centuries. In one way or another the
dominant beliefs of the age shaped the
image of the future that hundreds of
writers made it their business to depict
in the years between 1870 and 1914,
For example, the imaginary wars of the
future invariably contained material
drawn from Darwinian ideas about the
great war of nature, or from the
Marxist doctrine of the coming war
between the classes, or from the pro-
nouncements of the generals and the
politicians who held that war was a
natural and necessary operation of
human society.
In 1883 the German military writer
and later Governor of Belgium, Baron
Colmar von der Goltz, presented the
case for the next war in his most
influential study, 77te canton in Arms.
His good news for the world was:
The fact that each new invention and each
mechanical improvement seems somehow,
in these days, to find its way into military
service need not, therefore, alarm us. . . .
By these means, on the contrary, the battle
is only the more rapidly decided and the
war brought to an end sooner than in the
days of old.
That belief, which Foch and Moltke
taught in their staff colleges, carried
FUTURES Dec ember $975
The telephonoscope was a
favourite dream of the late
nineteenth century
One variant of the great game of
war was the revolt of women
over into the swift campaigns and
lightning victories that were the begin-
ning and the end of all the dreams
about the triumph of the nation states
in the unsuspecting decades before
1914. And when these expectations
joined with Darwinian ideas about the
survival of the fittest, the results
transformed the entire world. In 1895
the popular writer and journalist,
Louis Tracy, used Carnegies peaceful
proposal for a political union between
Great Britain and the United States as
the starting point for his story of 2%
FinaE wur. The Americans and the
British wage war against the forces of
the France-German Alliance; and
when the Anglo-Saxons conquer, the
author proclaims the evolutionary doe-
trine that
as life becomes more compIex and harder
grows the struggle, there is no escape for
peoples not fitted to bear its strain. The
Saxon race will absorb ail and embrace all,
reanimating old civilizations and giving new
vigour to exhausted nations. England and
America-their destiny is to order and rule
the world, to give it peace and freedom, to
bestow upon it prosperity and happiness, to
futfil the responsibilities of an a&devouring
people.
In obedience to contemporary ideas
about progress and evolution, the
designers of the ideal states showed how
a better kind of society must inevitably
follow from the conditions of their time.
Thus, Edward Bellamy, the author of
the most widely read utopia of the last
century, planned his account of the
perfect socialist world of poking Back-
ward as a forecast, in accordance with
the principles of evolution, of the next
stage in the social and industrial deve-
lopment of humanity. And in a
similar way William Morris traced the
origins of the socialist arcadia in his
N~isfrom Nowhe to that moment in
the future, when the workers in the
orthodox Marxist manner created a
regular organization in the struggle
against their masters. . . . This com-
bination had now taken the form of a
federation of all the recognized wage-
paid employments, and it was by its
means that those betterments of the
condition of the workmen had been
forced from the masters. Thus did
individual temperament and general
theory decide the scheme of things in
the ideal states of the future.
The most striking illustration of the
workings of the nineteenth-century
myths appeared in Three Hundred
Tears Hence (1881) in which William
DelisIe Iiay combined the ideologies of
material progress and evolutionary
development in the grandiose vision of
a world that would be forever white,
peaceful, and prosperous. The author
outdoes Jules Verne in the marvellous
contrivances of his applied sciences.
The technologies of his future history
ensure the well-being of a world popu-
lation of 130 thousand million in every
conceivable way : submarine cities
collect the mineral wealth of the seas
and algoculturists harvest the vast fields
of sea-food ; special conductors employ
the internal heat of the earth to make
bananas grow in Greenland; and the
basilica-magnetic boring machine has
brought the waters of the Caspian to
the barren areas of Asia. Mankind will
have Ieft the land surfaces of the world
by the twenty-first century, following
on the Terrane Exodus Decree which
directed that Cities of the Sea should
be built in sufficient number and size
to contain the population of the world.
That answer to the Malthusian
anxieties of the late nineteenth century
began with an essay on the ecological
problems of a crowded world ; and the
solution was to destroy all wild and
domestic animals throughout the planet:
We needed the land and we needed its
productions; we could not afford to retain
animals; the earth no longer had need of
them. Man found substitutes for the food
and clothing he had formerly derived from
the brutes; the space of land that could
support an ox or a sheep could be made to
produce in proportion to what could be
gained from the animals. . . . And so Man
FUTURf December 1975
passed away from the land ta the sea, using
the former only to yield his requirements
and the latter for residence.
The conquest of nature represented the
triumph of the applied sciences and the
collective wisdom of the united socialist
states of the world. Ail the great
advances in the Century of Peace-that
is, the twentieth century--had realized
the dream of Socialist philosophers and
Republican statesmen, and the
countries of the Old WorId and the
New, the races of civilized man,
became absorbed into the United
States of Humanity.
Later on, an application of Dar-
wininian ideas turned this convenient
combination of progressive theories and
utilitarian practices into a deadly
doctrine for the extermination of the
so-called lesser races. It is a telling
illustration of the way in which a
dominant belief can cause the imagina-
tion to accept a merciless policy, since
the author finds the authority for his
scheme of genocide in his understand-
ing of Darwinism. As he shows, the
duty of a rising race is either to absorb
or to crush out of existence those with
which it comes in contact, in order that
the fittest and the best may survive.
And so, in the name of this grotesque
union of social idealism and evolu-
tionary theory, the author wipes out the
coloured peoples of the world.
For it was seen to be impossible to raise the
Chinaman to the level of the higher race; it
was impossible to absorb him into it or fuse
him with it. Even more obviously impossible
was it to raise the Negro into a civilized and
intellectual man, to make him fit for
brotherhood with the Teuton and the Slav.
In keeping with that remorseless theory
the World Parliament orders that the
slaughter should begin, and the bomb-
ing planes start their runs across the
doomed lands of Africa and Asia.
In a paradoxical manner the fore-
casts in Three Hmdred Years Hence show
how these utopias of the future, like the
tales of imaginary warfare, are designed
to satisfy the most profound desires for
peace and permanence. Moreover, the
projected developments in that vision
of the 1880s and the real events in the
history of our world in the 1930s are a
warning that, if mankind and human
society are considered to represent the
whole of reality, then every human
being must conform to the require-
ments of the state. William Delisle Hay
and Adolf Hitler planned their future
worlds in keeping with most powerful
myths about the destiny and duties of a
chosen race; and both were willing to
carry their fantasies of social perfection
to the ultimate conclusion of trying to
hammer the world into the mould of
their dreams. Perhaps it was this
absolute tyranny of men and myths
that Voltaire had in mind when he
wrote Si Diet4 nexistait pas, il fa~d?ai~
linventer.
References
1. See John Sanderson, Demystifying the
historical process : Karl Marx, Futures
Vol6, No 3, June 1974, pages 271-276;
Programme for the proletariat: Karl
Marx, Futures, Vol 6, No 4, pages
340-345 ; Desmond King-Wele, Evolu-
tion and expectation, Futures, Vol 6,
No 6, December 1974, pages 5 12-517;
Correlli Barnett, The war that never
was, Futures, Vol 7, No 4, August 1975,
pages 335-340.
FUTURES Dec ember MS