Future Charts Best of science fiction movies Metropolis 2001: A Space Odyssey Brazil Solaris A Clockwork Orange Gattaca Blade Runner Strange Days Twelve Monkeys Soylent Green
Fritz Lang, 1927 Stanley Kubrick, 1968 Terry Gilliam, 1985 Andrei Tarkowsky, 1972 Stanley Kubrick, 1971 Andrew Niccol, 1997 Ridley Scott, 1982 Kathryn Bigelow, 1995 Terry Gilliam, 1995 Richard Fleischer, 1973
Best of science fiction books – classics Utopia Gulliver’s Travels Vingt Milles Lieues sous les Mers Auf zwei Planeten The War of the Worlds Brave New World Nineteen Eighty-Four The Martian Chronicles Last Man on Earth Fahrenheit 451
Thomas Morus, 1516 Jonathan Swift, 1726 Jules Verne, 1870 Kurd Laßwitz, 1897 H. G. Wells, 1898 Aldous Huxley, 1932 George Orwell, 1949 Ray Bradbury, 1950 Mary Shelley, 1826 Ray Bradbury, 1953
Best of science fiction novels – newcomers 1. William Gibson – Neuromancer (1984) With the novel “Neuromancer”, Gibson – who is probably the best known and most successful science fiction author of our time – entered the histories of literature and pop culture. And while he was at it, he also influenced the terms cyberspace and matrix. 2. Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) The British author’s widely recognized Science Fiction parody soon achieved cult status: As an alien race destroys the planet Earth, English everyman Arthur Dent escapes only by the skin of his teeth. Satirical, humorous, in-your-face. 3. Haruki Murakami – Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) The contemporary Japanese author Marukami tells the story of the 35-years-old narrator in his usual dreamlike and fantastic manner. The novel is set simultaneously in a grotesquely exaggerated Tokyo called HardBoiled Wonderland and in a parallel fantasy world, the ‘End of the World’. 4. Kazuo Ishiguro – Never let me go (2005) A story about orphans raised to be living organ donors who are brought up together in the ostensibly idyllic boarding school Hailsham. Ishiguro breaks with almost all codes of the traditional science-fiction novel, opting instead for an entertaining approach to the fundamental question of the consequences and the ethics of technological feasibility.
5. Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) Following a nuclear war, Earth has become all but uninhabitable. Most survivors have emigrated to Mars, the borders between humans and androids have become blurred. The bottom line of this dystopian novel is that man’s only distinguishing quality remains his capacity to empathise with others. 6. Dietmar Dath – Die Abschaffung der Arten [The Abolition of the Species] (2008) Dath is a fabulist, and in this novel he liberates both Earth and animals from man. Man has become extinct, and gone are his deadly sins, his faith in growth, and the climate crisis. Dath thus extends the tradition of great speculative literature about the downfall and rebirth of civilisation from Thomas Morus, Voltaire, and Mary Shelly and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to Stephen King and William Gibson. 7. Jasper FForde – The Eyre Affair (2001) The Welsh author Jasper Fforde is writing the most entertaining mixture of science fiction, fantasy, and crime story currently available on the market. Thursday Next is the name of the cartoonishly exaggerated heroine, who – as “Special Operations Literary Agent 39139” investigates at the crossroads of reality and fiction: the “bookjump” has been invented, and chases through the settings of Jane Austen novels are not uncommon. 8. T. C. Boyle – A Friend of the Earth (2000) Boyle’s sole science-fiction novel tells the story of climate change and environmental destruction. Its protagonist is a spry 75-year-old living in 2025. Growing old has ceased to be an issue, but food supply is problematic and most animals have become extinct. 9. Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake (2003) An elegy on solitude, the end of the world, and the post-apocalypse. Canada’s most famous author avoids extremes and, maybe for this very reason, sounds disturbingly convincing in her criticism of civilisation and satire on genetic engineering. 10. Christian Kracht – Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten [I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow] (2008) Kracht has written a counter-factual novel: What would have happened, had Lenin not left his Swiss exile for Russia in 1917, but had stayed to establish the first socialist republic? As readers, we join in about a century later and study the disastrous consequences of an alternative turn of world history.
Best of Zukunftsmusik (future music) 1. Sugarhill Gang – Rapper’s Delight “Now what you hear is not a test – I’m rapping to the beat”: the breakthrough of rap. The music was so new that artists had to explain what they were doing. 2. Brian Eno – Music for Airports Defined mood music and coined the term “ambient”.
3. Kraftwerk – Die Mensch Maschine In the best futuristic-modernistic tradition, Kraftwerk combined music and content to a complete artwork. 4. Richard Wagner – Der Ring des Nibelungen The man who coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk and the formative turn from melody to harmony. 5. Herbie Hancock – Sextant The apex of afro-futuristic space jazz. 6. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue The birth of modal jazz in a fantastic form. 7. David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Bowie raised playing with identities and encountering the other to a whole new level. Androgyny became a megatrend. 8. Funkadelic – Free your Mind and your Ass will follow Gave the slogan for post-James-Brown-funk and defined standards for afro rock funk. 9. James Brown – Live at the Apollo The first ever really popular double album: live recorded from the centre of black culture in Harlem. 10. Massive Attack – Blue Lines Defined the character of Bristol Sound. First ever Trip Hop album.
What is the future? Insights past and present “The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974), French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. “Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.” Professor John Kotter is considered an authority on “Leadership and Change”. He has been teaching at the Harvard Business School since 1972. “Social progress and the transition from one epoch to another is the result of progress made in the liberation of women, and the demise of a social order is the result of a reduction in the freedom of women. (…) Expanding the privileges of women is the foundation of any social progress.” Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French social theorist, was a representative of early socialism and a strict critic of early capitalism. “For man as an acting subject, the future is hence a realm of free power, for man as a knowing subject, a realm of
insecurity. It is a realm of freedom, because I am free to design what does not exist, provided I locate it in the future: It is a realm of power, because I have a certain power to realise my design (but not any design). And it even is the only realm in which we are capable of acting, because it is only with regard to the future that we may act, and the impression that we have of our ability to act is such that the image of an ‘actionable’ realm emerges.” Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903–1987), French philosopher and futurologist. “Every present develops its own, once again unfamiliar future. It thus becomes possible to deposit today’s problems in the future without meeting opposition.” Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), German sociologist and social theorist, was a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory. “Yet perchance it might be properly said, “there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist in some sort, in the soul, but otherwhere do I not see them; present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation.“ Augustinus (354–430), one of the most important Christian theologicans and an influential philosopher at the turn between the ancient period and the middle ages. “Anyone can learn from the past. These days it is more essential to learn from the future.” Herman Kahn (1922–1983) was a military strategist, cyberneticist, and a superstar of futurology. He became famous for his theories on the Cold War, in which he articulated “the unthinkable” and developed strategies for nuclear war. “When contemplating the future, it is useful to consider three classes of knowledge: 1. Things we know we know. 2. Things we know we don’t know. 3. Things we don’t know we don’t know.” Paul J. H. Schoemaker is Research Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish playwright and satirist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. “This ‘newest world’ is no far utopia, no fable of the year 1984 or an even more distant century. Unlike the science fiction novels of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell, we are not safely separated by the broad moat of time from the raging beast that is the future. The new, other, frightening is already among us. And so – as history shows - it has always been. The morrow is already present in today. But harmlessly masked still, hidden and disguised behind the familiar. The future is no fantasy cleanly distinguished from actual life; the future has already begun. Yet it can still be changed, if recognised in good time.” Robert Jungk (1913–1994) was a writer and journalist and also one of the very first futurologists. He is one of the most eminent pioneers of the international environmental and peace movement.
“Global futures cannot be predicted due to three types of indeterminacy – ignorance, surprise and volition. First, incomplete information on the current state of the system and the forces governing its dynamics leads to a statistical dispersion over possible future states. Second, even if precise information were available, complex systems are known to exhibit turbulent behavior, extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and branching behaviors at critical thresholds—the possibilities for novelty and emergent phenomena render prediction impossible. Finally, the future is unknowable because it is subject to human choices that have not yet been made. In the face of such indeterminacy, how can we think about the global future in an organized manner?” Paul Raskin et. al. in: “Great Transition – The Promise and Lure of times Ahead.” (2003)
Surprises from the Futurotope Which surprises does the future have in store for us? The Z_punkt staff present their highly individual visions: Klaus Burmeister: I would be seriously surprised if the physical transport of goods and people continued to remain the paradigm of mobility and globalisation. The future belongs to the mobility of the mind, the free flow of bits and bytes. There will be no ill-will when we say goodbye to congested streets, rolling inventories, and crowded trains. The interface between man and machine will become immaterial. In the future, our brains will control computers directly – no mouse needed. Goods will be produced decentralised, where they are needed. 3D printers will be basic household appliances. Food will be produced ecologically correct, in vertical farms close to the cities. We will work, shop, exercise, and socialise online in three-dimensional worlds. Unlimited mobility and simultaneous immobility are no contradictions. Teleportation or beaming, however, will be a long time coming. Andreas Neef: I would be very surprised if I was to talk to my fridge or use GPS to monitor my kids all day long. And if the latter no longer needed to cram Latin because they’d ingest knowledge using a pill. Many technological visions are merely ‘Godot’ trends: We keep waiting for them because they’re on everyone’s lips, but they never come. It would also be amazing if society learned how to handle reality more reasonably. Constant switching between alarmism and exuberance, however, seems to be one of the constants of human existence. Beate Schulz-Montag: At long last, the political community recognises the realities of the world of work and in cross-party agreement decides to introduce the unconditional basic income – for all of us, no explanations necessary, and no bureaucracy for the needy, but offering many new freedoms to make use of one’s labour autonomously and sensibly.
Karlheinz Steinmüller: E.T. telephoned – but we failed to understand him. In the cosmic white noise, scientists find a hidden signal which contains the whole truth about life, the universe, and everything. Holger Glockner: Sweet seventeen again: Using gene therapy, scientists manage to stop the ageing process. If you’re not interested in eternal youth, there’s always the tourism industry’s latest offer: time travels! Simply connect, in space-time, two points from different times in the rotating universe using a wormhole, take material with negative energy density to stabilise it, and off we go … Ageing like Dorian Gray, now that would really surprise me. Or if the church was actually right: the world is flat. Vanessa Watkins: In the Muslim world, speculative investment, e.g. hedge funds or derivates, have long since been prohibited, they come under the Maysir law (gambling and speculation). Similarly banned are participation in arms trading, pornography, tobacco, or the buying and selling of pork. 1.4bn Muslims still intend to invest their money with a profit. In recent years, western financial services have finally been prompted to develop an entire range of innovative products for this target group. This development lets me hope that we’ll soon see a new, broad, and cross-cultural debate on ethical investment, because it is not only 3m Muslims in Germany who are potential customers, but investors of other religious denominations. Gereon Uerz: As a result of the economic crisis, the United States lose their global economic, cultural, technological, and military supremacy in the late first decade of the 21st century. America returns under the United Kingdom’s patronage, and its social elites migrate to China, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. What remains is an agricultural nation of gargantuan dimensions which relies on precision farming to contribute significantly to solving the hunger problem. In addition, (re)forestation of a 1,000km wide strip running from North to South in the continent’s middle succeeds in creating the planet’s largest CO 2 draw down. Cornelia Daheim: With everyone fully focused on climate change and financial disaster, we might possibly ignore that technology is rapidly conquering whole new areas of life – with unsettled consequences. Surprise! All of a sudden, care-giving robots bed and entertain each and every underinsured octogenarian, once the source of affordable nursing personnel in the East runs dry. And thanks to genetic engineering, we’re able to order our offspring according to sex, hair colour, and size. Should the transhumanists manage to increase their following, realisation of the homo fabricatus will considerably outpace progress in the ethical debate on the principle of imperfection and the limits of responsible feasibility. Kai Jannek: Humanistic Business, i.e. the human rights are extended to include legal entities (businesses!). Article 1: No