Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll and Donald Trump

In earlier posts, I've talked about how fiction can be used to predict the future, or perhaps foreshadow what is to come, citing George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" as particularly noteworthy when it comes to trends in the United States and perhaps elsewhere.

Today, in the same context, I want to turn to another British author, who went by the pen name of Lewis Carroll.  When "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" proved to be overwhelmingly popular, Carroll wrote a sequel called "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There."

George Orwell: Frighteningly Prescient With More To Come

A May 2015 post entitled "Fiction of the Future" was the first in which I discussed the idea that one purpose of literature is to look ahead and try to imagine what might come of us, unconstrained by prevailing limits of scientific or other relevant knowledge. Therein, I cited George Orwell's 1940 novel "Nighteen Eighty-Four" as probably the most famous title within this genre.

Thanks to a service called "LitHub Daily," I just read a thoroughly researched, exceptionally chilling article by Stephen Rohde that shows how very prescient Orwell was.  Entitled "Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this rather lengthy piece is highly recommended.

There is little more to say about the subject now, but I suspect I will return to the topic in the future.
 

Will Advanced Robots Recreate Us As Works of Art?

As I have previously noted, one of the purposes of fiction is to look into the future and try to imagine what the world might be like if, say, terrorism reigns supreme or climate change overwhelms us.

Then there is the much-discussed topic of artificial intelligence and whether it might get out of control. The Washington Post carried an op-ed piece on that topic last month and I've written about it in earlier blog posts that readers can find here and here.

All of which brings me to a short poem in the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky entitled "The Robots."

In it, Pinsky, imagines a world in which exceptionally advanced robots ("Their judgement in its pure accuracy will resemble grace ...")  reign supreme. Man is gone, but the robots can comprehend the nature of humans through the dust that remains of them "and recreate the best and the worst of us, as though in art."

It's an arresting image. Picture yourself framed and hanging in a museum for the edification of a bunch of robots which "when they choose to take material form they will resemble dragonflies, not machines."