1984 and Beyond

[pyat]

So, the art exhibit commanderteddog and I went to see was well worth the investment of a lunch hour. The theme of the exhibit is "Not Quite as I Remember It."

I knew I'd like it when the first thing I saw upon walking in was a working replica of the MONIAC, which used water to model and predict the economic processes of the United Kingdom in the 1950s. I'm amazed I recognized it, frankly, having only read vague descriptions of it in high school. A fantastic version of it appears in a recent Terry Pratchett novel.

The exhibit included such things as a screening of the 1926 film, Bei Den Blindern. This film recounts a visit by blind German students to a graveyard. The exhibit presents photos of their subsequent recreations, in clay, of what they experienced.

The big draw, for us, was the screening of Gerard Bryne's 1984 and Beyond. This is a "re-enactment" of a series of interview panels conducted with prominent SF authors for Playboy magazine in 1963, filmed in Holland in 2005. The authors involved include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Voght, Frederick Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and several more. It gave me a weird thrill to tune in just as one of the actors was talking about Cyril Kornbluth, or all people. The re-enactment is of a wide-ranging discussion of the future, with the interviewer asking fairly dull questions like "How much will a trip to the Moon cost?", but the responses were fascinating. I want to get this on DVD, if possible.

The interaction of the authors was exactly what one might expect. For example, Asimov talks about the Soviets and the need to beat them to the Moon, while Ray Bradbury pipes up every now and again to say something lyrical about Mars while essentially adding nothing to the discussion at hand.

Sturgeon points out that the (then) current ideological conflict will be as meaningless to future generations as the Protestant/Catholic conflicts of the Age of Sail are to us. He posits that the Soviet Union will turn overnight to capitalism sometime after 1980, something that gets laughed at, or is met with "The sooner the better" type comments. Sturgeon then points out that a capitalist Russia is historically as likely to be an enemy of the West as Soviet Russia... except a much more effective one.

While a lot of it was talk about robot butlers and bases on the Moon by 1980, and how everyone would smoke amphetamine-laced cigarettes, there was also a lot of profound discussion about the way mankind would change in the future. Predictably, the more staid authors pooh-poohed the idea that mankind would change in any essential sense, while others looked forward to a transhuman future.

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The Power Plant - I think it ends on Labour Day, alas.