Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Translations
- Introduction
- Part I The Great Discourse on the Future
- 1 Utopians and Utopian Thought
- 2 Futurists and Futures Studies
- 3 Utopian/Dystopian Writers and Utopian/Dystopian Fiction
- 4 Science Fiction: The Nexus of Utopianism, Futurism, and Utopian Fiction
- Part II German Science Fiction in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- 5 Some Preliminary Thoughts on German Science Fiction
- 6 First Contact: Martians, Sentient Plants, and Swarm Intelligences
- 7 The Shock of the New: Mega Cities, Machines, and Rockets
- 8 Utopian Experiments: Island Idylls, Glass Beads, and Eugenic Nightmares
- 9 To the Stars! Cosmic Supermen and Bauhaus in Space
- 10 Visions of the End: Catastrophism and Moral Entropy
- 11 Virtual Realities: Caught in the Matrix
- 12 Alternative Histories: Into the Heart of Darkness
- 13 Big Brother Is Watching Us: Who Is Watching Big Brother?
- 14 Artificial Intelligences: The Rise of the Thinking Machines
- 15 Eternal Life: At What Cost?
- 16 Social Satires: Of Empty Slogans and Empty Hearts
- 17 Critical Posthumanism: Twilight of the Species or a New Dawn?
- 18 High Concept: Time, the Universe, and Everything
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Chronological List of German SF Novels—A Selection
- Appendix 2 Chronological List of German SF Films—A Selection
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Futurists and Futures Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Translations
- Introduction
- Part I The Great Discourse on the Future
- 1 Utopians and Utopian Thought
- 2 Futurists and Futures Studies
- 3 Utopian/Dystopian Writers and Utopian/Dystopian Fiction
- 4 Science Fiction: The Nexus of Utopianism, Futurism, and Utopian Fiction
- Part II German Science Fiction in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- 5 Some Preliminary Thoughts on German Science Fiction
- 6 First Contact: Martians, Sentient Plants, and Swarm Intelligences
- 7 The Shock of the New: Mega Cities, Machines, and Rockets
- 8 Utopian Experiments: Island Idylls, Glass Beads, and Eugenic Nightmares
- 9 To the Stars! Cosmic Supermen and Bauhaus in Space
- 10 Visions of the End: Catastrophism and Moral Entropy
- 11 Virtual Realities: Caught in the Matrix
- 12 Alternative Histories: Into the Heart of Darkness
- 13 Big Brother Is Watching Us: Who Is Watching Big Brother?
- 14 Artificial Intelligences: The Rise of the Thinking Machines
- 15 Eternal Life: At What Cost?
- 16 Social Satires: Of Empty Slogans and Empty Hearts
- 17 Critical Posthumanism: Twilight of the Species or a New Dawn?
- 18 High Concept: Time, the Universe, and Everything
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Chronological List of German SF Novels—A Selection
- Appendix 2 Chronological List of German SF Films—A Selection
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
HOW WE FEEL about the future is important. This determines not only when we decide to start a family, make a purchase, go for a new job, or take some other risk but also our level of political engagement (from apathy to activism) and our mental health and well-being. Until recently, people in the Western world believed that their children should and would live in a better world (whether defined by standard of living or quality of life) or at least have more choices then they had. This is no longer the case. A recent study by the Pew Research Center showed that a majority of Americans expect life to get worse by 2050. In the annual Allensbach poll that has been conducted in West Germany since 1949 (and in a united Germany since 1990), we can see that global events have had a considerable impact on whether we can look to the future with hope. For example, in 1950, at the time of the Korean War, only 27 percent of West Germans said that they were looking to the future with hope. The oil crisis in 1973 (30 percent) and, much later, the Iraq War (31 percent) caused similarly low levels of optimism, while the fall of the Berlin Wall produced a record high level of 68 percent. But how do we know what the future is likely to hold in store?
If utopian thought has led to debates about what the future ought to look like, the futurists’ approach aims to be more dispassionate in anticipating, on some sort of scientific basis, what the future is likely to look like. To be more precise, futurism, futurology, and futures studies are concerned with identifying probable futures (plural) and determining which of them are likely to become reality. As in utopian discourse, one finds a very broad range of competing voices and approaches, reaching from the specialist to the popular, the ideological to the pragmatic, as well as from the transparent and retraceable to the opaque and surmised. But in sifting through the literature, it quickly becomes apparent that futurists are currently as concerned about the future as the utopians are.
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- Beyond TomorrowGerman Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries, pp. 33 - 45Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020