Sifting Through the Future-Present

Science Fiction in Non-Speculative Art

by Kola Heyward-Rotimi

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To live in our contemporary era is to live thinking of a future in decay. The proliferation of digital environments has reconfigured how power is channeled through traditional outlets like nation-states, and the exponential growth of global supply chains, platform urbanism, and the existential dread of climate change have all evoked questions around stability: there’s no guarantee that our world will remain whole by the end of the century. At the crux of this confusion lies speculation—a dense tangle of “what-if”s, all centered on the decades to come.

While a significant portion of Western politicians have failed to address the oncoming paradigm shifts in non-performative ways (look to the Green New Deal for the definition of “too little, too late”), meaningful questions about our near-future have seeped into public discourse regardless. Now that the world grapples with COVID-19, the “new normal” has become an established bogeyman—how can anything normal, anything of the status quo, be maintained when every week brings an event (or a catastrophe) that was supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime? Loosely defined futures thrive in our present’s anxiety. In terms of what’s next for geopolitics, urban design, and our individual lives, we are in uncharted territory—and so it should come as no surprise that to imagine the future, people have begun to search for landmarks in science fiction.

Speculative genres are where the future is fussed over. They inevitably reflect more on the present than they ever could on what comes next—but since time travel has proven to be infeasible, we have no better alternatives for prediction. Stories told about the near-future quickly become obsolete in the wake of our always advancing present, but we still turn to the interpretive lens of sci-fi whenever something in our contemporary world hints at the future to come. Consider how readily cyberpunk is evoked when showing pictures of real metropolises, or whenever class divides are manifested through people and technology. When a coordinated drone show makes a floating QR code in the sky (Zhou 2021) or a hacker organization holds American infrastructure in gridlock through ransomware (Benner & Perlroth 2021), the first comparisons always arrive from the realm of fiction.

As the late cultural critic Mark Fisher theorized in his article “SF Capital,” “what was once satiric prophecy is now blank realism, devoid of any ‘ulterior motives’, devoid, in many important respects, of any interest” (2001). In the face of pure chronological progression, the potential futures that were built through sci-fi subgenres like cyberpunk have been stripped of their shock factor. They have shrunk so much in the face of accelerated digital vectors that they don’t describe exciting possibilities—at best, the potentialities the subgenre describes vaguely parallel an already existing present. Cyberspace has become mundane in real life, something far too integrated with the physical world for it to even be a meaningful, separate environment. Techno-Orientalist visions of Western cities filled with “Asian” aesthetics are not only racist in their otherization, but also completely fail to predict the emergence of 21st century multi-polar geopolitics (for an interesting analysis on changing dynamics between the Global North/South, see Alex Hochuli’s “The Brazilianization of the World”). And, of course, our cities aren’t drenched in neon.

Speculative genres inevitably reflect more on the present than they ever could on what comes next.

Despite its obsolescence, cyberpunk remains a frame of reference to describe and envision the near-future. If cyberpunk were to be reinterpreted as a secondary-world genre rather than a direct predictor of the future, the tension of its inaccuracies would be lessened. Still, a time so rife with new situations and ideas deserves a better predictive tool. The challenge becomes how to design frameworks that more accurately reflect the mesh of technology, history, politics, and (most importantly) biases that we currently live with.

Surprisingly, one of the most exciting genre developments in tackling the complexity of our modern world comes from outside of science fiction. I have begun to call these experiments in storytelling “future-present” media, an emergent subgenre spanning film, music, and literature that confronts the speculative within totally plausible, real-life spaces. These are contemporary narratives that remain grounded in reality with no extrapolation beyond what exists in our present day, but which nevertheless engage with the complex futurity of current society. Future-present work is defined by selective focus on new dynamics between people, technology, and shifting definitions of sovereignty, utilizing tropes from science fiction to reinterpret the contemporary world.

Future-present stories are very much in their infancy, and the scant examples of them bring into question whether the trend will ever grow past this point. Author Imogen West-Knights referred to the literary side of this subgenre as the “Internet novel,” with Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This as primary examples (2021). I would also include Red Pill by Hari Kunzru under West-Knights’s designation. These novels came out in the last three years and incorporate life on social media as integral aspects of their contemporary worldbuilding, with characters spending lengthy moments in digital environments. These stories are arguably within the lineage of William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, which painted a vivid depiction of post-Internet, post-9/11 life through the lens of the modern advertising and fashion industries.

Fiction doesn’t actually channel what comes next: it predicts, it prophesizes.

Out of all forms of media though, the majority of future-present stories come from films, where movies like Blackhat (2015), A Land Imagined (2018), and even Spring Breakers (2012) implement the storytelling tropes of science fiction to accentuate speculative potentiality in the normal world. Film critic Marco Abel pinpointed the exciting nature of future-present stories in an analysis of German director Christian Petzold’s corporate thriller Yella:

“These are films that may appear to be speaking directly to the Zeitgeist haunting the moment of their release; upon further analysis, however, these are films that even at the moment of their initial emergence affect viewers with the kind of force that is impossible to define at the time of first reception because, though affectively sensible, it remains essentially a force of the future—a force the effects of which still await the conditions of their full actualization at some moment still to come; yet we cannot help but sense that this force, untimely as it may be, nevertheless received its first, prescient and precise, diagnosis in form of the very images and sounds our eyes and ears, indeed our bodies and minds, just encountered.”

Marco Abel, 2009

While Abel captures the creative potential of future-present art in the above quote, we also have to acknowledge that the act of gleaning the future is very much a speculative one. Fiction doesn’t actually channel what comes next: it predicts, it prophesizes. The fictional tropes, narratives, and designs that become timely only become so through efforts to make them reality. They are integral to societal mutation only through retrospection. iPads are now associated with Star Trek communicators, and Neuromancer’s pervasive digitality paints a familiar arc to anyone with a social media addiction. The mechanism through which we channel the future is muddy, and our imaginary scenarios of what comes next are fused to the present. This art prototypes the future but it shouldn’t be confused for the future. Future-present work identifies how new mechanisms for prediction are being formed, which provides a potential guide for developing new ways of imagining speculative worlds. It also reveals how these creative works tap into the Zeitgeist that Abel mentions. The subgenre acknowledges the inclusion of science fiction as a main driver for how we envision the contemporary world as a speculative reality.

Olivier Assayas’ film Boarding Gate (2007), a French thriller about a retired sex worker embroiled in a murder plot devised by shadowy multinational corporations, is a prime example of future-present media. Like Yella, the film uses the narrative trappings and melodrama of a thriller to tell a story about dislocation in late-stage capitalist society. In Boarding Gate’s world—our world—bursts of violence and manipulation are couched in stretches of corporate jaunts. The narrative thrust happens in cars after a business outing, within washed-out cubicles, and over terse phone calls. While these social interactions are all diluted with jargon and dissociative professionalism, their effects lead to bright spots of physical brutality and pain, even murder. The violence is obfuscated across business transactions.

This future-present movie not only focuses on capitalist maneuvers, but how those maneuvers instate themselves through the global supply chain. Without the emphasis on emergent forms of planetary logistics, Boarding Gate would simply be a corporate thriller. Instead, the film leans into borderless, post-21st century logic, a frantic mode of trading and diplomacy that disregards national boundaries. Boarding Gate highlights contemporary mechanisms of distribution through prolonged shots of shipping containers. Characters vacillate between shipping ports and boardrooms hemmed by glass walls. In-between are wide shots of skylines that echo the love for infrastructural complexity found in cyberpunk movies like Patlabor 2 and Blade Runner. The characters travel across the globe, enclosed by snippets of massive architecture, and end up in the same cramped office spaces, encapsulating the breadth of our supply chains and the corporate platforms that uphold them.

As a future-present work, Boarding Gate refuses to abandon the constraints of the present day, but it still plays with emergent frameworks.

Similar depictions of megacorporations reconfiguring planetary systems can be found in cyberpunk as well. The main difference is that in Boarding Gate, those elements that were once speculative are now acceptable within the realm of a contemporary narrative. As a future-present work, Boarding Gate refuses to abandon the constraints of the present day, but it still plays with emergent frameworks. This film is a thematic sequel to Assayas’ 2002 thriller Demonlover, which dramatized the world of early Internet porn companies. While there is much to critique for both of these films in their depictions of race, gender, and non-Western locales—arguably the same issues found in cyberpunk—they grapple with emergent trends of the modern era by framing them with techniques appropriated from science fiction.

For the future-present to become a truly realized subgenre, to become an exciting narrative mode that marries the imaginary capabilities of speculative and non-SFF traditions, then it must be explored using the full breadth of human experience in our digital society. That means highlighting stories which decenter the West, like Mati Diop’s jaw-dropping debut Atlantics (2019) and, as previously mentioned, A Land Imagined by Yeo Siew Hua. Just as important is accepting that the inherent digitality of our contemporary world calls for fiction that ignores established distinctions between genre and literary narratives. The most reflective and nuanced stories of our present will be told using techniques from speculative fiction.

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References

Abel, M. (2009). German desire in the age of venture capitalism. The Cinema Guild. http://cinemaguild.com/homevideo/ess_yella.htm

Benner, K. & Perlroth, N. (2021). U.S. seizes share of ransom from hackers in Colonial Pipeline attack. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/us/politics/pipeline-attack.html

Fisher, M. (2001). SF capital. k-punk (accessed through Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). https://web.archive.org/web/20060708142027/http://cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/sfcapital.htm

West-Knights, I. (2021). The rise of the internet novel. Prospect. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/internet-novel-patricia-lockwood-lauren-oyler-no-one-is-talking-about-this-fake-accounts-review

Zhou, V. (2021). Drones light up Shanghai’s sky with a QR code (that you can scan). Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n9vb/shanghai-drone-show-qr-code

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