Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who saw the future ..

Pohl and Kornbluth's  magnum opus The Space Merchants is 60 years old this year.A key science fiction text it is extraordinarily prescient with its vision of a world run by corporations ,its culture defined by advertising and its environment wrecked by overpopulation and pollution.When I first read it back in the 1960s when the Cold War was still in existence I was surprised to find no mention of either the Soviet Union or Communism which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.This seems to have been the most prescient feature of all of the novel   for the softly and silently vanishing away of Soviet Communism, Americas great Cold War bug bear is the most astonishing fact of our times.At the time the novel was written in the early 50s at the time of the Korean War such a demise for Communism would have seemed more far fetched than speculations about space travel.At the time of publication Senator McCarthy was hunting communists ,in The Space Merchants the enemy are not commies but consies ,conservationists the novels term for those we now call  greens.

Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth , The men who saw the future.

Philip K Dick is Hollywoods favourite science fiction writer the inspiration for films going back thirty years both adaptions of his own novels and also for works using similar themes. His work first appeared in science fiction magazines and in cheap paperback novels in the 50s ,60s and 70s.At the time popular depiction of the future barring the possibility of nuclear war were generally fairly positive. Dicks stagnant ,high tech,alienated,scuzzy , run down future turns out to have been fairly accurate as a prediction.However the future depicted in his books was actually originated by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law.Pohl and Kornbluth are largely forgotten now but in the 1950s and early 1960s they were the cutting edge of science fiction

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages Final Part

H G Wells in his 1941 book The Outlook For Homo Sapiens raised some interesting points about a return to medieval conditions.He envisaged a world in which large scale systems such as rail networks,postal systems and international trade might break down but radio broadcasts,simple light aircraft and fire arms would continue to exist.Fire arms are very simple machines and there are plenty in working order that are a century old.Existing supplies of fire arms will last for centuries if well maintained and ammunition can be made in simple work shops as they are in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.Distilled Spirits are another  a fairly simple technology which people in the future would be unlikely to forget.We can already see signs of such a scenario in the combination of crumbling infrastructure and advanced digital technology which exist in parts of the early 21st century world. The probability is that the future will resemble the past rather than the dream of progress dreamt by the 20th century .The reappearance of such evils as slavery and piracy is proof of this.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages

In 1994 the BBC 2s nightly cultural round up show The Late Show produced its own program on the new middle ages fronted by journalist Benjamin Wooley who has recently published a book on Doctor Dee Elizabeth the firsts Merlin.The Late Show was the kind of program that has been removed from the BBCs major  channels as part of the dumbing down process and now confined to its cultural ghetto BBC 4.In this program Wooley looked forward to the new millennium as part of a return to medievalism.Part of the doomier predictions made in the program was mention of the Black Death which was linked to various 1990s bogies such as AIDs ,SARs and avian flu.In the nearly twenty years since the  program was broadcast global pandemics have been conspicuous by their absence so in that respect there has been no return to medieval conditions.Likewise the feared rise in global temperatures and melting ice caps has failed to materialize.The most interesting prediction in the program and one which proved correct was that of the demise of the printed word in the wake of the internet.As the Internet had only been open to the general public for a few years at that point this was quite an accurate prediction.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

In the 20th century the medievalists always cut a slightly absurd figure as their ideology seemed incongruous in the face of the then modern world as it was with its strong nation states,industrialism ,secularism and ideology of progress.Now in the 21st century articles on what has been dubbed the new middle ages are quite frequent.The  rise of China the old middle kingdom and the resurgence of Islam has produced a world that resembles the late middle ages in many ways. Science fiction novels in the 20th century frequently depicted future worlds which combined high technology with feudal social structures.Nowadays the idea of a technological society in which large chunks of the population are semi-literate and semi numerate has been realized.The wealth that the population is surrounded by seems to appear as if by magic divorced from human effort and manufactured in distant continents which they would be hard put to identify on a map.As in the middle ages the clerisy which still has some   actual  some understanding of the world and how it functions make up only a small proportion of the population.

The Hobbit, The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

The medievalism of the Inklings was the tail end of a long tradition dating back to the Romantic movement of the early 19th century taking in along the way the novels of Sir Walter Scott and his various imitators,the philosophy of historian Thomas Carlyle,the Gothic architecture of Pugin who designed the Houses Of Parliament ,the paintings of the Pre- Raphaelites ,Tennyson's Idylls of The King ,the operas of Richard Wagner and the socialism of William Morris.The term Middle Ages was coined in the 17th  century to describe the period of western history between the ancient world of Greece and Rome and the modern world which is dated from the 16th century or thereabouts.The intellectuals of the modern period have always felt uncomfortable about the Middle Ages preferring to think of themselves  as being the heirs of Greece and Rome.Of course in a roundabout way this is true but the legacy was passed on through the civilization of the medieval period.The late medieval period of the 15th century saw the rise of strong national states in Spain England and France ,capitalism and technological developments such as gunpowder ,the printing press, the magnetic compass and the ocean going sailing ship.All Chinese inventions admittedly but developed by Europeans to a more advanced level than their originator.So in effect the late medieval period was more innovative and intellectually curious than the Classical period which was fairly stagnant culturally in comparison. The modern world still continues to misunderstand the Middle Ages in many respects.Frequently in modern film adaptions it is portrayed as a drab dun coloured world whereas the medievals in fact loved bright colours and used plant and mineral dyes and paints to achieve them.Likewise medieval armies eschewed the idea of camouflage and burnished their armour so that the sun would flash on it announcing their arrival from a distance. along with the noise from their drums and trumpets .Their love of spicy food had even more momentous consequences as it was the spice trade that inspired explorers such as Columbus in their search for a sea route to the Indies.

The Hobbit,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

As well as JRR Tolkien,C S Lewis and Charles Williams other Inklings who were authors were Warnie Lewis the brother of C S Lewis,Roger Llancelyn Greene,Neville Coghill  and the philosopher Owen Barfield. Barfield is the one I am least familiar with at the moment though I dare say I shall get round to his work eventually.I have recently been reading Warnies book on the social history of the France of Louis XIV which was first read to the Inklings and thought it quite good.Roger Llancelyn Greene is famous for his children's books retelling myths and legends Norse and Classical.He did a particularly good book retelling the Arthurian legends marvelously illustrated with wood cuts.This is still in print in a Puffin classics edition I believe.Neville Coghill produced Penguin classics renditions of Chaucer both The Canterbury Tales and Troilus And Cressida in modern English verse translations, He aslo collaborated on a film version of Marllowes'  Dr Faustus with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor the only time this work has ever been filmed and is worth catching to see Burton in full classical mode.