prophetics
If poetics is the study of the different aspects of poetry, then does that mean that prophetics is the study of the different aspects of prophecy? Since prophetics doesn’t seem to yet exist in the standard corpus of English, I would like to put forward a slightly different definition for it. Thinking about my daily journal and the things I’ve been writing about there, one thing that I keep coming back to is the extent to which science fiction can and cannot be seen as prophecy.
This is not a clean discussion, since there is the obvious and inescapable element of self contamination. That is, people see something in a television show or movie, or read about it, and then have a desire to make it real in the world. Take for instance the sick bay bed in the original Star Trek. We don’t yet have these in hospitals, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them at some point.
But I’m also thinking bigger. Not just the singular inventions, but the grand sweep of ideas. (I like thinking about the grand sweep of ideas.)
I have a vague memory of reading Norman Spinrad’s Agent of Chaos, and the necessity expressed therein of preventing the closure of society, because in that closure, freedom dies and the authoritarian observational state wins. I need to reread it, because it’s been a very long time, and I wonder how much I’ve forgotten and how much I didn’t notice the first time through.
But we are nearing such an authoritarian observational state, or at least such an observational state. The old defense of anonymity in the face of too much information to process has been broken by the capacity of the machines we’re building and the machines we’ll build in the near future. It’s no longer the case that we can just hide in the eddies of the data flow, hoping not to be noticed.
But this now seems to inspire a quest. What would be required to found prophetics as a proper discipline. What is the strangest prediction from fiction that’s come to pass, and what would be the most worrying? This latter question has me worried, given some of the predictions that have been made.
multijimbo 