In sci-fi works, humans often use cryonics technology to “conquer” death, get rid of the shackles of time, and immigrate to distant alien planets. This is not the boundless fantasy of science fiction writers. Advanced science is providing more solutions to human survival problems. This issue of Science Fiction Space Station brings you two articles, “Time Immigration” and “Sponge Age”. Let us take a look at the future “magic” world that science fiction writers have shown us.
Once regarded as one of the three giants of western science fiction in the 20th century, Arthur Clark once said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is no different from magic.” In fact, we have been with “magic” for much longer than science. The so-called “magic” is actually a kind of rhetoric for human beings to rationalize and explain various phenomena that were beyond human cognition. Among them, it includes not only the cognition of the objective world, but also the subjective imagination of human beings.
When human civilization entered the scientific age, scientific thinking changed man’s view of the world, and various originally incredible phenomena were given reasonable explanations. The natural forces hidden behind these phenomena have also been released through science and technology, and have made our modern lives today. If you tell people who lived 120 years ago that one day humans will fly in the sky on iron birds, or talk to people on the other side of the ocean without going out, he must think it is a fantasy. But in that era, there lived a group of people who liked to ponder these “future magic”, they were science fiction writers.
In 1888, British writer Herbert George Wells, who was later named the “Father of Modern Science Fiction” by the later world, published a short story called “The Nautilus of Time” in the “Science School Magazine”. At the time, this novel did not attract enough attention. Later, Wells repeatedly revised this short story until the fifth draft was published in 1895. This is the famous “Time Machine.”
Although before that, it was not uncommon to describe literary works that traveled through time and space. But the pioneering nature of “Time Machine” is that it uses rigorously demonstrated scientific hypotheses as the theoretical basis of time travel, and technological inventions as the material carrier through time and space. These two points have been regarded as the norm by almost all time travel science fiction works of later generations. To this day, time travel is still one of the science fiction subjects that people are passionate about.
Interestingly, although “Time Machine” created the first time travel science fiction, the main thrust of this novel is not time travel. What Wells really wants to express through this novel is his social evolutionism. Wells grew up in the Victorian era, the golden age in British history, when economic prosperity, technological progress, colonial expansion, and optimism flooded intellectual and intellectual circles. But behind the performance of prosperity and progress, there are increasingly profound and difficult to reconcile social contradictions and class antagonisms, and various social movements are surging. With his keen observation, Wells captured these social phenomena, and from the perspective of social evolution, he conceived the prospect of human society going to extremes 800,000 years later. In Wells’s writings, the future of mankind is presented to readers in a “magical” way-mankind is split into two completely different biological species: the Eloy living on the ground seems to have a carefree life, in fact It was just the livestock raised by the Moroks living underground, and the Moroks worked hard underground for years and maintained the harmonious operation of the ground world, but they could no longer return to the ground to enjoy the sunshine. It can be seen that, for both the Eloy and the Moroks, “social progress” and biological evolution finally alienated “man”, leading to the ultimate human tragedy.
In contrast, the time travel to the future, under the writing of the American science fiction master Robert Heinlein, was dyed with the rose color of the “American Dream”. In his science fiction novel “The Gate to Midsummer”, the protagonist Dan Davis is a remarkable inventor. He co-founded a company with his friend Miles to produce maid robots for domestic service. Later, the young Bara Dajin joined the company as a secretary. However, what Davis never expected was that Miles and Da Jin used deception to gain control of the company and “kick” him from the company. This made Davis almost desperate, so he decided to use the hibernation cabin to go to 2000, 30 years later. When Davis woke up from hibernation, what shocked him most was that the various types of robots that existed only in his vision have become ubiquitous commodities. After a detailed investigation, he discovered that the inventor of these robots turned out to be himself. To this end, he visited the physicist Dr. Tuvichel, and used the time machine made by the doctor to go back 30 years ago. He first went to the Suttons who had helped him, gave them his robot design drawings, and asked them to set up a new company called “Aladdin Chamber of Commerce”. Then, when he waited for the day when he negotiated with Miles and Da Jin, he sneaked into his residence, and Shi Xiaoran destroyed all the unfinished drawings and models.
The hibernation cabin is also used for time travel to the future. Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s “Time Immigration” has chosen a more ambitious perspective. In order to alleviate the pressure on the environment caused by the population, 80 million people entered the hibernation cabin to move towards the future. During the period, the ambassador as the team leader was awakened many times, but every time he woke up, the future world was not the ideal residence for immigrants during these times. Until 11,000 years later, the life span of the hibernation system was approaching its limit, and 80 million people had to end this long time travel. But what awaits them is a new world back to basics. Here, the author presents the unique oriental view of the cycle of nature in the form of science fiction traveling to the future, showing a unique charm of cultural fusion. And Dou Mingxi’s “Sponge Age” has a strong “wasteland wind” flavor of future science fiction. With his bold imagination, he puts forward a warning about cherishing peace.
In the concept of modern people, the future is always accompanied by beauty, convenience, prosperity, etc., and the foundation of all these is the continuous progress of science and technology. But just like the magic described in many ancient myths, technology itself has no good or evil. The key lies in whose hands it is in and how to use it. The future direction is actually in the hands of everyone today.
