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New Nightmares: A series on Channel 4

Read enough science fiction, and you notice that no matter how far
in the future the story may be set, human nature doesn’t change. SF writers
feed off our current concerns and obsessions, so their novels each time
give us a road map of our worries about the future. New Nightmares, three
documentaries in the Without Walls slot on Channel 4, explores some of the
ideas that SF writers and just plain scientists have come up with in the
past 20 years. Weaving through each episode are newsreels from the Bakelite
Age, that time between the 1930s and 1960s (we’re now in the Matt-Black
Brushed Aluminium Age), film clips (‘Open the pod bay doors, Hal’), brief
extracts from books, daffy futuristic scenarios with actors trembling in
the face of some golem, and interviews with a roundup of the usual suspects,
mostly British SF writers. It is good to see them presented in the same
jail for once.

The programmes are intriguing: the juxtaposition of clips can set you
thinking beyond what is said. Impatient with natural evolution, we have
taken it over hence prosthetics, plastic surgery, the search for artificial
intelligence. Unable to understand nature, we argue that we should befriend
it (and vice versa, when nature does not care if we are here or not). I
found the overall effect dystopian television to slash your wrists by. Perhaps
the most interesting revelation is one that is unspoken. A newsreel from
the 1950s when ‘ideal’ women looked like Doris Day shows the latest robot,
a thing resembling ten dustbins welded together. A small woman clambers
onto its huge metal feet, and it begins to shuffle back and forth. ‘Here’s
one dancing partner guaranteed never to stand on your toes!’ chuckles the
commentator. Computers reaching up walls ‘multiply two numbers a yard long
in the blink of an eye’. And, of course, we were going to colonise the stars.
Just as soon as you got off that robot. The trend was reflected in SF that
spanned the stars, or films where mutant ants were the size of buses. Good
or bad, the future would be big.

Nowadays everything has shrunk: smaller robots, smaller computers, smaller
ambitions. We deal with DNA, not death rays; the ozone layer, not the Horsehead
nebula. SF, being sensitive to this change, reflects it and retreats into
cyberspace. It reflects our own growing fear about losing control. You must
be small to be beautiful: in, for example, Greg Bear’s short story Blood
Music, a mad scientist (some cliches are timeless) injects himself with
micro-miniaturised supercomputers that tidy up his bloodstream. But the
supercomputers become conscious and take him over until his identity is
lost in the mass, like an ant in a colony.

In such a trend you can trace our disappointment at the unbridgeable
distance to the stars and our growing worries about the shrinking room
left here. That’s the nightmare: the future is not what we wanted it to
be. Not that the writers can help. They only gave us the map. Where we
drove was our choice.

New Nightmares runs for three weeks and began on Tuesday, 13 April.