Glass Houses and Computers are the Wave of the Future

In the Wall Street Journal this morning, John Miller has a sharp little piece the original dystopian science fiction novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 “We.” It describes the novel’s fraught journey out of censorship, and it does a fine job of tracing the origins of other dystopian classics like 1984 and Brave New World back to Zamyatin's book. And who knows—maybe "We" even inspired George Lucas. It certainly looks that way:

The characters in "We" have numbers instead of names--the book's protagonist is D-503. In Randall's translation, they are called "ciphers" (in other versions, they are "numbers"). They wear matching uniforms and shave their heads. "The Table of Hours" dictates their lives: It tells them when to wake, when to work and when to sleep. "One sees oneself as part of an enormous, powerful unit," says D-503. "Such precise beauty: not one extraneous gesture, twist or turn."

This sounds like nothing if not a description of Lucas’ THX-1138, which, along with Brazil, is one of two or three totalitarian dystopia movies to create a convincing, immersive cinematic world.

Miller also writes that:

In "We," the Guardians do the watching--a task made easier by the fact that everyone lives in glass houses, literally. Curtains may be lowered only at scheduled times for sex, which, because there's no marriage, is rationed through a system of pink slips. Promiscuity is more or less encouraged because it prevents ciphers from creating personal bonds that would conflict with their duties to the One State.

This seems interesting to me. I’m reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress right now, and one of the things that strikes me continually is how accurately the book portrays the future of computers, yet how it misses some things that we take totally for granted. In one sense, it gets the insta-searching, database-perfect memory of computers pretty precisely, the way they tend toward networks like the internet, which acts as an omnipresent catalog of all digital knowledge and spits back answers. But in Moon, the interface is through the phone system, and computing power is still absurdly impractical for the public—the primary computer in the book is a room sized monstrosity owned by the government while individuals aren’t even entirely aware such things exist. But this reflects what Heinlein knew, and thus, what he extrapolated on.

Similarly, in “We,” security isn’t electronic or digital in anyway—it’s accomplished by means of literal, physical, glass walls. The effect is the same, but the technology is laughably outdated. To me, this points to the way science fiction often acts as punditry as much as narrative. For all the concern about the genre’s techno-geekery, much science fiction (or speculative fiction, as many of its authors prefer) is concerned as much or more with societal development as spaceships and laser beams. More broadly, this suggests something about the dismally repetitive nature of society; no matter what the technology, civilizations will always tend toward the same flaws. Fortunately, there will always be science fiction writers to notice these flaws and expound upon their potential abuses.