Man in the High Trump Castle

Too bad Phillip K. Dick isn’t around anymore. What would his Man in the High Trump Castle look like in terms of a picture of the United States under President Trump? Of course there would be an enormous wall running all along the border with Mexico and the complexion of the electronics gadgets that people own would also be radically changed since they would be fewer and more expensive with protective tariffs making it impossible for Chinese or Japanese products to be sold in the US. Now you would pay double for your MacBook Air manufactured here in the States and of course double for your Honda, Toyotas and Subarus. But what a good thing this would be since there would be much more intensive share-a-ride programs which would also lessen traffic. As for cellphones and computers, Americans would become much more communal and in fact large kibbutzim would open up expressly to enable middle class families to stream their favorite Amazon series. While there wouldn’t necessarily be more rich people, the same old ones who were rich would continue to get richer in order to facilitate more supply side economics. In fact Donald Trump himself would become so rich that he could employ both Polish workers and Americans on all his jobs and keep everyone happy. This would be one of the most important consequences of trickle down economics. Now on to foreign policy. President Trump's treatment of captured terrorists would rival any of the excesses of the Inquisition. Tomas de Torquemada would be proud. For every beheading, in fact, another jihadist would be placed in the Large Hadron Collider and turned into a Boson. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth would be an important element of our justice system. There would be no more problems with Kim Jong-un as North Korea would be no more. Yes, the bad news would be that the population of the country would be annihilated, but the good news would be that there would be no need to worry about whether our sanctions were taking effect. Similarly, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda would all have virtually disappeared along with the territories in which they once operated. Oh, finally on the matter of health care. Naturally Obamacare would be successfully repealed and President Trump would be reassuring about the fact that everyone would be taken care of, though some would claim his assurances were as worthless as the paper on which some graduates claim their degrees from Trump University have been issued.

Sci-Fact

    George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. By switching the numbers he came up with a future that must have seemed far off, though it was only 36 years away. In any case, the supposed case of futurism was not so much a futuristic vision as a regurgitation of the past, in particular the world of the totalitarian police state, the deformed child of the marriage between the Utopian ideologies of fascism and communism. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Stanley Kubrick movie based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel (written while the movie was in production), was similarly un-ambitious in its choice of future, since the year of the title was not that far away from the year in which he movie was made (1968). And what about Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and The Minority Report, two sci-fi classics that deal with realities that might have occurred or could soon occur? Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (which popularized the word “cyberspace”), Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (which anticipated the web), Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Stanislav Lem’s Solaris and any of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin could also arguably be regarded as reportage, albeit of a philosophical cast, like one of those three-part series the Times sometimes runs about the devastation wrought by wars or climate change.
    There is nothing too futuristic about science fiction, and in fact nothing too futuristic about the future itself. Of course there are novels that take place in futures that are tens of thousands of years away, but it is a curiosity of most science fiction that the worlds created, whether they are wish fulfillments or not, have irrefutable relevancy to the times in which they were written. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days were not so much fantasies as reflections on the Age of Exploration, which culminated at the end of the 19th century. Is Hal, the computer at the center of 2001, a character of escapist fantasy or a piece of sociology that is merely unsupported by any data? And what better forecast of the anonymity of technological society than H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man?
    Science fiction is not harmless escape. It’s dangerous because of its propensity to tell the truth. That was what Orwell was hinting at by simply rotating the digits for his classic novel. Isn’t Orwell really saying that the dyslexic reversal of two numbers only hints at their identity, that 1984 is really 1948, and vice-versa, with Big Brother still in command? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is neither brave nor new but chillingly close to our present-day attempts to control and manipulate the gene pool. Newspapers might be rendered anachronistic by the ubiquity and speed of electronic media, but there is one thing faster than television and the Internet and that is the imagination of the science fiction writer, which distills the undercurrents of reality, turning them into parables that can easily be said to contain the real headline stories of the day. Remember Tiresias?  

Parallel Universe

The notion of the parallel universe appears as a philosophical concept in Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence. Though the concept had a long and venerable history in many religions and philosophies, the notion of the parallel universe may be one of the only philosophical concepts that went on to have an afterlife in both science (Poincare’s Recurrence Theorem) and science fiction (in the work of masters like Phillip K. Dick). Doesn’t Dick’s The Man in the High Castle suggest that the Allied victory is coeval with that of the Axis, which lives on as an alternate world? Hard science itself is forced to deal with the notion of parallel universes when it confronts the uncertainties of string theory and quanta. Yes there are successions of worlds only a millionth of a second apart, repeating themselves with minute divagations and forever bookending in conformity or complete dissolution. Isn’t Minority Report a description of a form of parallel universe in which what is meant to be is essentially coexisting with what is?

   

It’s very comforting that life is going on in some  multiverse, and that even after death we will still be living in a slightly altered form in another dimension. If only we knew how to jump from one dimension to another, we could switch horses when we were diagnosed with a fatal disease. The lights never go out. Life continues on despite the fact that it has eliminated us. We live on in successive universes as if nothing had happened at all.  For every loss, death, breakup, failed job search, failed romance, there is the parallel universe where the reverse has taken on a life of its own, and the life we know continues without missing a beat.

   

Over the expanse of infinite time, we exhaust enough possibilities so that we come back to where we started, both a second too early and three seconds too late.