On May 8, 2006, James Kunstler had this to say about our future technological prospects...

Riding the van out of the airport Friday night to the Park-and-Fly lot, with the planes floating down in the distant violet gloaming, an eerie recognition came over me that life today is as much like science fiction as it will ever get -- at least as far ahead as I can see. Some of my friends' kids may never fly in airplanes. They may never own cars. At some point twenty, thirty years ahead, they may not take for granted throwing a light switch in a dark room.

I think our future perception of all this will be as a kind of reverse science fiction -- in the sense that sci fi has until now always been presumed to take place in the future. The science fiction of my friends' children will take place in the past. When some of them are old, the omnipresent electric power of this time, and all the wonders that ran on it, will seem like an unfathomable occult force that saturated the world like a spell. They will tell stories about it in the flickering firelight, and their grandchildren will blink in amazement.

It's too bad they will never see a Harry Potter movie, with its utterly blase and incessant deployments of magic. These children of the future will be astonished when somebody manages to roast a parsnip.

I've noted before, the parsnip reference is probably just a joke. As for all the rest, sad to say I think he means it. But that's not what I want to talk about today. What caught my eye is his unwarranted assumption that he knows what science fiction does and does not do. Clearly, the sniggering ponce's humility glands crusted shut years ago.

sci fi has until now always been presumed to take place in the future. The science fiction of my friends' children will take place in the past...

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Like he knows what he's talking about. Regressed, immiserated cultures have long been a staple of "sci fi", with or without parsnips. Savages living in the shadow of a lost golden age is a theme done to death, albeit in a number of interesting ways.

For instance, there are countless numbers of "After the Bomb" stories. In most of them, the degenerate starveling survivors look back at our time with a mixture of envy and awe, much as medieval peasants might look back on the Roman empire. As well, they look back with hatred at our inability to forestall the fall.

Peering somewhat further afield, the fictional galaxy is positively cluttered with lost colonies whose populations have reverted to fascinatingly varied barbarisms. They miss the empire too.

Let's leave the starry reaches off the table for the moment, and stick a little closer to home. For today, the fallen earth should be enough.

Having misspent my youth reading far more science fiction than was good for me, I find that Kunstler's vision of our future, which he seems to think is stunningly original, evokes memories of old pulp stories that I'd not thought about in years. Unwittingly, he's been reinventing the wheel.

Of all those fondly remembered stories, I suspect that Edgar Pangborn's tales of New England after the Thirty Minute War come closest to matching Kunstler's dour prophecies.

Here's an example for you. Centuries after the atomic war, from the darkest of dark ages, one of Pangborn's characters writes the following lines in his journal, addressing them to an audience that may not exist (Europeans), in a language that's nearly dead ( Twentieth Century American English)...

After the plagues, your people may not have turned against the very memory of their civilization in the sort of religious frenzy as ours apparently did, determined like spoiled brats to bring down in the wreckage every bit of good along with the bad. They may not have, but I suspect they did. The best aspects of what some of us now call the "Golden Age" were clearly incomprehensible to the multitudes who lived then: they demanded of the age of reason that it give them more and more gimmicks or be damned to it.

Grim, isn't it? Grimmer than it would actually be, I expect. Pangborn's people don't strike me as responding very realistically to their plight. Everything went smash and no one tried to reboot civilization? They were too psychically exhausted? I don't buy it. Too many garage tinkerers know too much.

But insofar as out-kunstlering Kunstler goes, those stories surely do hit the sweet spot. What with the red plagues and the melting ice caps, the flooding midwest
and the one-in-five babies born dead or hideously mutated, the resurgent wilderness teeming with black wolf and brown tiger, and the Holy Murcan Church vigorously crushing intellectual inquiry, well, Pangborn more than matches the life-after-the-oil-crash crowd. And he did it in 1964!

Taking a happier tack, Poul Anderson wrote a too brief series of stories set roughly a millennium after the holocaust. After centuries of environmental chaos, the dark age is drawing to an end. Climate has been stable for half a millenium and the total human population has climbed back up to around two hundred million.

In certain favored areas high culture is reasserting itself, but most humans still languish in poverty, ignorance and disease. Evolving in isolation from one another, the most successful survivors have created radically different cultures.

Preeminent among the successful peoples is the Maurai Federation, an amalgam of New Zealand's English and Maori peoples, along with various Polynesians, Australians, Hawaiians, etc. Being so isolated from the rest of the planet, they came through the bad times with relatively little damage. Think about it. Wouldn't you rather be in New Zealand when the balloon goes up?Their territory comprises most of Oceania, but their trimaran merchant ships can be found in any port of the globe, and if there is such a thing as a dominent culture, they are it.

For the most part, their suzerainty is characterized by a light touch, verging on benign neglect, but there are occasional technology transfers and educational scholarships. Their unstated foreign policy is to preserve cultural diversity, while simultaneously preventing a revival of the old industrial culture that they claim nearly killed the planet.

Basically, they're a bunch of easy going green ideologues who want everyone to get along. Sounds nice, doesn't it? But not everyone is satisfied with the status quo. Here's Lorn sunna Browen, an astrophysicist from Corrado. He's been clandestinely hired by the Brahmards of Beneghal, to assist in their (tippy top secret) construction of a thermonuclear fusion generator...

"Scraping along on lean ores, tailings, scrap, synthetics, substitutes...because the ancients exhausted so much. Exhausted the good mines, most of the fossil fuels, coal, petroleum, uranium...then smashed their industry in the War and let the machines corrode away to unrecoverable dust in the dark ages that followed. That's what's holding us back girl. We know everything our ancestors did and then some. But we haven't got the equipment they had to process materials on the scale they did, and we haven't the natural resources to rebuild that equipment. A vicious circle. We haven't got the capital to make it economically feasible to produce the giant industries that could accumulate the capital."

He's speaking to an undercover officer in Maurai Naval Intelligence, who responds rather condescendingly to his complaint...

"I think we're doing quite well...Sunpower, fuel cells, wind and water, biotechnology, sea ranches and sea farms, efficient agriculture--"

He remains unconvinced...

"We could do better though." His arm swept a violent arc that ended with a finger pointed at the bay. "There! The oceans. Every element in the periodic table is dissolved in them. Billions of tons. But we'll never get more than a minimum out with your fool solar and biological methods. We need energy. Power to evaporate water by the cubic kilometer. Power to synthesize oil by the megabarrel. Power to go to the stars."

Amen, brother Lorn! And please bear in mind that this was written back in 1962.
So who's a prophet now? I swear to god, one reason I get so exasperated with these peaker types is that this has all been done.

If you're curious how the story ends, read on. The undercover intelligence team discovers the hidden reactor. Turns out the Brahmards were right to try and keep it under wraps. To defend their high ideals, the Maurai commit various acts of murder, vandalism, and theft, followed by a brisk naval engagement.

With metal for the destroyed magnetic coils being in short supply, the Beneghalis will not be reconstructing their power plant any time soon. Say, a generation or two?

The Maurai agents depart, mourning the necessity of killing, but comforting themselves with the knowledge that it was all for a good cause. The world is still safe for cultural diversity and low energy renewables. Eventually, they got what they deserved.