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| image credit: elive.com.ua |
by Brandon Engel
Although some critics dismiss the work as low-brow and sensationalist, horror and science-fiction literature can have socially redeeming value, if only insofar as that both lend themselves to identifying common sources of anxiety and dread. Horror typically deals with primal, visceral fears - isolation, bodily harm, or other more abstract neurosies. Science fiction typically has something factual as its basis, and offers grim speculations about issues pertaining to science and industry, such as the implications of space travel, or widespread fear of rapidly advancing technology itself becoming an instrument of oppression.
Even more disturbing than the notion of technology being used as an instrument of oppression is the idea of machines functioning with some level of autonomy, perhaps acting as instruments of oppression by their own volition. This is a theme familiar to genre fans. It was a concept addressed in several episodes of The Twilight Zone, and it is also a theme which Stephen King has embraced himself, notably in the novel Christine (which was later made into a film directed by John Carpenter), about a 1957 Plymouth Fury with a mind of its own and a lust for human blood. King also explored the concept more ambitiously in the horrendous, cocaine fueled script for the film Maximum Overdrive, wherein all electronic appliances are trying to kill people.
Years before King was a professional writer, his hero, Ray Bradbury, had explored similar concepts himself. You may recall Bradbury’s short-story August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains, which tells the story of an eerily vacant, fully automated suburban home. In keeping with all of the advances in domestic technology that were abundant in the United States in the years after World War II, the house Bradbury envisioned was capable of speaking to the home’s occupants, preparing meals, and even lighting cigars. We come to learn that the family who owned the house was vaporized by an atomic blast; we catch glimpses of silhouettes permanently burned into the sides of buildings, and baseballs that have become forever embedded in the side of house. The house inevitably burns itself to the ground - reinforcing the notion that technology, if left unchecked, could be our undoing as a civilization. Bradbury had also toyed with this concept in some of the stories he contributed to E.C. horror comics in the fifties, most notably the story entitled The Coffin, which tells the story of an elaborate, fully automated coffin which entraps a man, and buries itself deep into the earth. These stories challenge romantic, egalitarian notions of technology as something that has bettered society wholesale and they also provoke speculation as to what degree technology is a potential liability for humanity.
Bradbury’s writing address anxieties that were rampant in the cold war era. The United States had demonstrated its nuclear capabilities by obliterating Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and at the height of the cold war, anxieties ran high. Children of the cold war era may recall going through the drills in school where the entire class would crouch underneath desks. Mock villages were constructed for the sole purpose of being decimated by test bombs. There was also intense friction between the western empire and the former U.S.S.R., and the unspoken truth behind the space race was that both superpowers were demonstrating their potential military capabilities. For instance, it was horrifying to the American public when Sputnik was first launched in 1957.
What’s alarming about the present day is that it often feels like real world technology is, in effect, manifesting some of the anxieties. With all of the paranoia in recent months surrounding the NSA scandal. and stories about Google acquiring the home automation company Nest, it’s more than a little disconcerting to read about things like the ADT Pulse home automation system that controls multiple household functions (kitchen appliances, heating and cooling, etc.) from a single smartphone app. What happens when someone hacks into our mobile phone when we leave it in the back of a cab? Or worse, what happens when the tech giants who manage these systems (who may or may not be working in tandem with the government) gain even more insight into our day to day lives - so much so that our smartphones might essentially function as the “telescreens” predicted by George Orwell in 1984?
Technology plays an increasingly large role in society, and for every advantage and convenience this affords, it also opens up new and elaborate means for people to harm one another. It’s for this reason that science fiction and horror should not be outright disregarded as trivial or unsophisticated - but rather, as a vehicle for discussing wide scale problems.
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Brandon Engel is a blogger in Chicago who loves vintage horror and classic speculative fiction. Among his favorite authors are Arthur Machen, H.P Lovecraft, and of course, Stephen King. Follow Brandon’s zany adventures (and misadventures) on Twitter: @BrandonEngel2
It's interesting to compare and contrast how King and Bradbury approach the common trope of the hazards of technology.
ReplyDeleteBradbury is more in the classic sci-fi cautionary mode so common of the fifties that Engel discusses (though he has more affinities to Huxley than Orwell). In this case, Bradbury is more of what readers and viewers accept as the standard cautionary fable mode of telling these types of stories.
King, on the other hand, is doing roughly the same as Bradbury, however his tales go in slightly interesting directions.
The thing to keep in mind about King is that he writes in the gothic tradition of Poe and Hawthorne. That means, in his stories, a piece of technology gone wrong is more often a symbol of some sort of human failing or vice, or even a symbol of sin.
There is another level which King's tech stories might bear some relation to. In the E.T.A. Hoffman short story "The Mannequin", a student assembles a mechanical woman, and eventually it becomes his destructive obsession.
What's interesting about Hoffman's story is that the technology in it is more a symbol, not just of vice, but also something that raises questions of the nature of human identity in some fashion that bears a very interesting resemblance with Christine.
Of the two, I'd say Bradbury seems to be the genre writer with the most healthy approach to technology, seeing both it's potential and it's drawbacks in a kind of measured balance that makes his both supportive, and justly cautionary of where our toys may take us.
ChrisC