What limits say about us

In a recent article, I proposed that policy makers and scientist could use scenario planning to prepare ourselves to face unknown challenges, for instance future crises. In this article, I would like to discuss the way we look at unknown futures from a different angle: reading our reality, inspired by fiction. Essentially, how far from reality fiction could be? Guided by this question, the article will reflect on a feature that connects dystopian literature with our world: limits.

The (un)known world

Let’s start with the conception of limits in “The city and the stars” of Arthur Clarke. This stunning science fiction narrates the story of a hyper-technological future, played in a galaxy where humans were enclosed in a fully regulated city, managed by a central computer: Diaspar. A city that was thought in at least two and a half billion years from the present; a city where nobody has entered or left for as long as anybody can remember. The main character of the story, Alvin, is different from the others. He is not fearing what could be outside of the city, he actually feels pushed to leave. The author plays with a type of uncertainty linked to the unknown beyond the known world, beyond the limits of Diaspar.

“Alvin stared out towards the limits of his world. Ten—twenty miles away, their details lost in distance, were the outer ramparts of the city, upon which seemed to rest the roof of the sky. There was nothing beyond them—nothing at all except the aching emptiness of the desert in which a man would soon go mad” (Clarke, 2012: 27)

The limits here are interconnected to a common element of dystopian narratives: memory. Indeed, the main character (Alvin) reflects on what is away from the limit: the stability of the place. Diaspar is known to be quite a conservative city.

“Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot change outside of narrow limits. The Memory Banks store many other things outside the patterns of our bodies and personalities.” (Clarke, 2012: 45)

Furthermore, the classic anthropological distinction between “we” and “they” is represented in this narrative as a representation of the here (Diaspar), the stable and known, versus the outside, the uncertain, a sort of fatalist vision of the unknown world:

“He was always wanting to go outside, both in reality and in dream. Yet to everyone in Diaspar, ‘outside’ was a nightmare that they could not face. They would never talk about it if it could be avoided; it was something unclean and evil. Not even Jeserac, his tutor, would tell him why…” (Clarke, 2012: 10)

In a recent article, I proposed that social pressure is more visible in the margins, that could be either physical or symbolic. Thus, the limits are spaces where differences are more pronounced: what is inside, what is outside, what you have, what you don’t have, what you understand, what you don’t. How is this reflected in Clarke’s narrative? While we are away from the limits, we stay in a more conservative setting, a sort of comfort zone. However, in our world, boundaries could be also seen in the romantic way as key for transformation.

What if?

Some authors of the dystopian genre will work on the climate severity. While many texts were written in the past and talking about the future, we can easily think about that future today, our capacity of action and reaction to a pressing limit: how far can we go with climate crisis?

John Ballard is the author of “The drowned world”, a fantastic post-apocalyptic fiction in which global warming made almost all the Earth uninhabitable. The story invites us to follow the trip of a group of scientists that will research environmental developments in a flooded, abandoned London. In the text, the author shows in the actions of the characters a constant decision-making in uncertain scenarios, particularly associated with the climate issue: how to subsist in a world in which the temperature increases, where resources are scarce, where necessary to establish new perimeters because of the raise level of the sea. The author is playing with the limits of survival.

Similar questions are surrounding the whole world nowadays: what if we don’t reach our climate targets? What if we don’t change our way of living? Will we stand in the world, for how long and in which conditions?

In a recent book I read “The world without us” (for the record, not a dystopian one), Alan Weisman reflects on what would happen to the built and natural world if the humans suddenly disappeared. The author put the world we live to limit situations, navigating through multiple contexts such as Chernobyl in Ukraine and Varosha in Cyprus, describing how abandoned cities succumb to nature. An interesting passage is connected to a refinery in USA (Valero), in which all the equipment is connected and managed by computers. But when there is need, somebody (a human being) is around the clock. The author will ask immediately “what if human beings suddenly disappeared while the plant was still operating?” We are talking about a chemical plant, named as the author as a ticking bomb even in normal operating days. While humans won’t be around, so no human harm, the question posed here would turn to: what are we leaving to the world if we disappear, and such a disaster occurs? Well, we can see Chernobyl or Seveso. We are not talking only about what we can leave to the world, but also the way we live in our world. Are we living with ticking problems?

What for?

Dystopian narratives work on the concept of uncertainty as a way to address historical social problems by means of using fiction and in quite a critical way. Today, I moved into linking fiction to reality through a common concept: limits. Starting from the emotional limits of authors who usually write in edging societies and social distress, to the same stories thought in worlds that trespassed the limits we fear today.

Ulrich Beck, a classic of post-modern sociology, would say that we live in a risk society: our world’s biggest uncertainty is the mere contingency of the future of history. On the one side, if we question ourselves either we are truly on the edge or not, we may fall in pure speculation. On the other side, if we follow the romanticism idea of continuous transformation, into a greener world, a sustainable, resilient one, what would that mean?

It seems that multiple crises – or a single continuous one – brought back to reflect on us, human beings, as responsible but also capable of transforming the way we live. Re-sounding the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre who said that human being is "condemned to be free", that is, thrown into action and fully responsible for their life.

Dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, including ecological approaches (eco-utopia), can serve as inspiration to point the attention to starting analytical points. What the analysis of limits can offer to us is understanding the uncertain as a discovery process. We can keep watching our known garden, the same set of tools used, reused and abused, or we can explore what is different. Indeed, the limits can be analysed in the objective differentiation of multiple intersections (diversity), but they can also – and they should – be seen as subjective boundaries creating process of inclusion, exclusion and indifference. Indeed, classification of humanity in future settings has been subject of multiple dystopian narratives. Is reality then far from fiction? Well, in reality, this social and cultural perspective is often, if not progressively, missed.