| In the words of inept television psychic Criswell, "My friends, we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." Why are we obsessed with the future? Why does it haunt us? The Other comes to us from the future. We anticipate the Other, but the arrival is always surprising. To prepare for the Other: this is the mission of ethics.;Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction fuses contemporary philosophy with cultural texts preoccupied with the future arrival of an other: science fiction. The book begins with critiques of traditional notions of time and space by philosophers like Levinas and Heidegger, who seem to call for a reevaluation of our understanding of these concepts. Beginning with the question of scientific law, which provides the ground for "science fiction," we explore the scientific romances of H. G. Wells. Then we tackle the idea of progress, the anticipation of the future, in both Wells and Walt Disney. The alien, unexpected thing is what arrives from the future, and so we follow its trajectory in Joseph Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (and the two film versions, both titled The Thing), EC comic books of the 1950's, and Star Trek. But the alien other may infect us as well, getting under our skin, and so Chapter 2.4 explores the notion of the cyborg, the border creature which fuses self and other, as it appears in Japanese cyberpunk and the films of David Cronenberg. The way is now prepared for the complex onto-theology of Philip K. Dick, articulated through his novels, his secret exegesis, and his bizarre personal life. Through this, we observe the process of empathy, the key to ethics. The concluding chapter summarizes what we have learned and calls for a new theory of ethics, based on the relationship between possibility and actuality articulated in contemporary quantum physics. Such a theory, which leaves open the possibility of the Other and encourages empathy, is necessary for survival in our multicultural world. |
