Study of Alternate History-themed Speculative Fiction Valuable to Practice of New Media
New Media is about exploring possibilities, as a category under the breadth of science and technology, and is far from a philosophical field such as Humanities and Social Sciences, where the factor of ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ could be reasons to change the phase of the humanity. Alternative histories could be defined as literary or fictional pasts where history, and in our case the future pattern of technological development, is arbitrarily changed. Hence, the idea of “What if” is substantially significant to the studies of New Media practices, since histories define the course of the future events and that makes the ‘digital future’ dependent on the past inventions and/or decisions; today is tomorrow’s promised yesterday. The technological growth taking place in an era is highly dependent and wrapped up with the politics and social structure of the time and place, such as the policies of the government at the time in particular nations as well as social and religious paradigms. The genre of science fiction is mostly devoted to the speculative fiction of either the envisaged future or the past alternate history-themed speculative fiction, which is vitally valuable to the practices of new media, for it opens the possibilities of the surreal and imaginative world set free from the clutches of the everyday local practicalities, which might make it harder for the mind to delve into abstraction.
In the Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: "The Difference Engine" as Alternative Victorian History Sussman (1994) states that “Alternative histories occupies a cusp between contemporary notions of the constructed nature of history and the demands of the historicity. The narrative of the past is altered, but in distinction to fantasy or Well’s later alien invasion or time-travel plots, events within alternative history remain in the realm of the historically possible, potential, unrealized (p. 1-2).” This is vital to understand that the aberrant courses of events in the past could have led to a different present, which provides an opportunity for the contemporary new media practitioners to consider peculiar routes of creating or solving ‘things;’ providing food for the unleashed imagination. Sussman (1994) claims, “The primary rhetorical effect of alternative history lies in the shock of defamiliarization” (p. 5) which is vital to understand that technology should not be taken ‘for granted’. Furthermore, the author uses a concise and expressive phrase to illustrate the importance of studying alternative histories: “One major effect of alternative history is to dramatize that what we accept as inevitable is only contingent, one among an infinite number of possibilities, of forking paths;" presuming that the occurrence of events is predestined, that social change and technological change are determined, which certainly is not the case and the option we are living with is one of many. The study of alternated history themed speculative fiction could be valued by the study of science speculative fiction novels. For instance, ‘The man in the High Castle’ (1962) by Dick depicts repurposing of body parts as a part of technology, and ‘Century Rain’ (2004) by Alastair Reynold, which articulates Earth being cloned in the 1920s-30s by aliens that developed its own history. Each novel imagined the world where the trajectory of technological development is very different and where the past might have been altered. This discussion furthers brings about the idea of ‘Variantology,’ stating that the history of civilization does not follow imperative divine paths. Media are bridges, coupling linkages; they are constructed attempts to connect with what is separated. Conclusively, the study of alternate history-themed speculative fiction is food for intellectuality and indicatively guided pathway for multi-directional future innovations.
In the Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: "The Difference Engine" as Alternative Victorian History Sussman (1994) states that “Alternative histories occupies a cusp between contemporary notions of the constructed nature of history and the demands of the historicity. The narrative of the past is altered, but in distinction to fantasy or Well’s later alien invasion or time-travel plots, events within alternative history remain in the realm of the historically possible, potential, unrealized (p. 1-2).” This is vital to understand that the aberrant courses of events in the past could have led to a different present, which provides an opportunity for the contemporary new media practitioners to consider peculiar routes of creating or solving ‘things;’ providing food for the unleashed imagination. Sussman (1994) claims, “The primary rhetorical effect of alternative history lies in the shock of defamiliarization” (p. 5) which is vital to understand that technology should not be taken ‘for granted’. Furthermore, the author uses a concise and expressive phrase to illustrate the importance of studying alternative histories: “One major effect of alternative history is to dramatize that what we accept as inevitable is only contingent, one among an infinite number of possibilities, of forking paths;" presuming that the occurrence of events is predestined, that social change and technological change are determined, which certainly is not the case and the option we are living with is one of many. The study of alternated history themed speculative fiction could be valued by the study of science speculative fiction novels. For instance, ‘The man in the High Castle’ (1962) by Dick depicts repurposing of body parts as a part of technology, and ‘Century Rain’ (2004) by Alastair Reynold, which articulates Earth being cloned in the 1920s-30s by aliens that developed its own history. Each novel imagined the world where the trajectory of technological development is very different and where the past might have been altered. This discussion furthers brings about the idea of ‘Variantology,’ stating that the history of civilization does not follow imperative divine paths. Media are bridges, coupling linkages; they are constructed attempts to connect with what is separated. Conclusively, the study of alternate history-themed speculative fiction is food for intellectuality and indicatively guided pathway for multi-directional future innovations.
Reference:
Sussman, H. (1994). Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: "The Difference Engine" as Alternative Victorian History. Victorian Studies, 38(1), 23-23. Retrieved October 28, 2015, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618879
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