{{B}}Future of the World{{/B}}
The year 1972 was marked by publication of a controversial book. The Limits to Growth. This study of the world's future, done by a team of MIT scientists with the aid of computer "mode-is" of the future of our society, forecast a planet wide disaster unless humankind sharply limits its population growth and consumption of natural resources.
66. ______ .
Many refused to believe that disaster is possible, probable, inevitable-if we don't change our mode of running Spaceship Earth. But science fiction people were neither surprised nor outraged. The study was really old news to them. They'd been making their own "models" of tomorrow and testing them all their lives.
For what the scientists attempted with their computer model is very much like the thing that science fiction writers and readers have been doing for decades. Instead of using a computer to "model" a future world society, science fiction writers have used their human imaginations. This gives the writers some enormous advantages.
67. ______ .
Science fiction writers are not in the business of predicting the future. They do something much more important. They try to show the many possible futures that lie open to us.
For there is not simply a future, a time to come that's inevitable. Our future is built, bit by bit, minute by minute, by the actions of human beings. One vital role of science fiction is to show what kinds of future might result from certain kinds of human actions.
68. ______ .
For while a scientist's job has largely ended when he's reduced his data to tabular or graph form, the work of a science fiction writer is just beginning. His task is to convey the human story: the scientific basis for the possible future of his story is merely the background. Perhaps "merely" is too limiting a word. Much of science fiction consists of precious little except the background.
the basic idea, the gimmick. But the best of science fiction, the stories that make a lasting impact on generations of readers, are stories about people. The people may be nonhuman. They may be robots or other types of machines. But they will be people, in the sense that human readers can feel for them, share their joys and sorrows, their dangers and their ultimate successes.
69. ______ .
The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character-or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power-the stories that stand out in the minds of the readers are those whose characters are unforgettable.
70. ______ .
The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important, he must show how human beings can and do litemily create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly, the future belongs to us-whatever it is. We make it,, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try.
Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity. Never has such a bridge been more desperately needed.
Writing in the British journal New Scientist, the famed poet and historian Robert Graves said in 1912, "Technology is now warring openly against the crafts, and science covertly against poetry. "
What Graves is expressing is the fear that many people have: technology has already allowed machines to replace human muscle power; now it seems that machines such as electronic computers might replace human brainpower. And he goes even further, criticizing science on the grounds that truly human endeavors ours such as poetry have a power that scientists can't recognize.
A. The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times.
B. To communicate the ideas, the fears and hopes, the shape and feel of all the infinite possible futures, science fiction writers lean heavily on another of their advantages: the art of fiction.
C. One of the advantages is flexibility.
D. Most people were caught by surprise when the book came out.
E. To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the five problems lurking ahead, is not enough.
F. Apparently Graves sees scientists as a sober, plodding phalanx of soulless thinking machines, never' making a step that hasn't been carefully thought out in advance.