Headlong into futurity

Abstract

‘So, with a kind of madness upon me, I flung myself into futurity.’ These are the words with which H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller powers his machine into high gear, as a result of which he will soon find himself more than 800,000 years removed into ‘futurity,’ a sufficient distance from which to speculate on the long-term effects of the profound changes occurring back in England in 1895. With this abrupt gesture, Wells also pretty much invented speculative fiction, the literary genre which self-consciously addresses the present by flinging the technology of today into the futurity of an imagined tomorrow. This genre constitutes something of a secret sharer to the conventional history of technology, which operates primarily by tracing genealogies of the technology of today into the lived past of the last few centuries. To consider the relationship between literature (or art or culture) and the history of technology is to consider the relationship between speculating about the future and studying the past, between what the philosopher Ernst Bloch termed the ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of cultural production and what historians can verify or at least hypothesize about what actually happened in the past. This distinction manifests itself in many ways in the literature, art and culture of technology, as is evident in the range of topics and approaches in the three full-length essays and two briefer case studies on the topic that share the current issue of History and Technology with this introduction. This distinction between the study of the literature of technology and the historiography of technology should be regarded less as a stark divide than a question of perspective, which is why elements of the approaches taken by the essays here overlap with and complement those of the history of technology more strictly speaking. Nevertheless, observing where they separate from and run counter to the conventional methodologies of history and how those methodologies are changed when incorporated into the discipline of literary studies will also, hopefully, be instructive regarding what both fields can tell us about their shared object of study, what we can term in the broadest sense the ‘technological imaginary’: the range of ways in which technology is and has been conceptualized and represented. In this introduction, I discuss some key sites of overlap and divergence and suggest some of their implications both for the study of the literature, art and culture of technology and for the history of technology.