7 - Fantasiecle

Summary

Chloë: The future is all programmed like a computer – that's a proper theory, isn't it?

Valentine: The deterministic universe, yes.

…

Chloë: But it doesn't work, does it?

Valentine: No. It turns out the maths is different.

Chloë: No, it's all because of sex

(Stoppard 2000: 103)

An English computer whizz invented the twenty-first century. This, of course, is a fantastic claim, but Tim Berners-Lee rightly gets credited for inventing the World Wide Web, which became operational in the 1990s, and which quickly began to shape the way people around the globe learn, communicate, trade, debate, are manipulated, scrutinised and entertained, fall in and out of love, reinvent their identities, engage in politics, and indulge their fantasies and sexual desires. Such a state of affairs might have seemed impossible, or indeed unthinkable, for much of the twentieth century, the stuff of science fiction, although another Englishman had proposed something similar in the late 1930s. In a series of talks on what he called a World Brain, H. G. Wells, himself one of the pioneers of science fiction in the Victorian Age, with works including The Time Machine (1895), speculated that such an entity would ‘bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like common understanding’ (Wells 1938: 17), adding that it would spread

like a nervous system, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common medium of expression into a more conscious cooperating unity and a growing sense of dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny. (33)

This seems a remarkably prescient approximation of what Berners-Lee created, although what a relentlessly utopian mind like Wells might think about the actual World Wide Web must itself remain the stuff of speculation. More than a century after The Time Machine, Roger Luckhurst notes, in ‘British Science Fiction in the 1990s: Politics and Genre’, that there was a ‘remarkable renaissance … in different types of genre fiction’: ‘Detective fiction, fantasy, Gothic, horror and science fiction entered phases of extraordinary vitality in the 1990s, all the more striking for being surrounded by the language of entropic decline and millennial gloom (Luckhurst 2005: 78).