Lest the dystopian subtype of science
fiction be taken too literally as a predictor of how human civilization will be
likely to turn out, the underlying meaning of such films can be construed as
bearing on human nature, which, given the glacial pace of natural selection, is
very likely to stay pretty much the same for the foreseeable future. In Avatar
(2009), for example, the human proclivity to greedily extract wealth for
oneself or one’s company without ethical concern for the harm inflicted on
other people (or peoples) in the process underlies any assumed thesis concerning
space travel and whether we will eventually colonize other planets. The meaning
is much closer to home, in us and the regulated capitalistic societies that we already
have. Similarly, The Terminator (1984) can be understood less as a
prediction of a future in which androids enslave mankind and more as a snapshot
of how machine-like and destructive our species had already become. The
machine-like efficiency of the Nazis, for instance, in killing enemies of the
state and clearing eastern villages entirely of their inhabitants in such vast
numbers can be labeled as a state sans conscience. Thirty years after
she had graduated from Yale, Jill Lepore returned to give the Tanner Lectures
on fears stemming from that pivotal film of a robot apocalypse in which
machines rather than humans control the state. Besides predicting a highly
unrealistic future, Lepore’s orientation to prediction using the science-fiction
genre of film can be critiqued.
The full essay is at "The Terminator."
