Looking back to the future

The future does not surprise or impress Patrick Gyger, director of the Swiss science fiction museum, the Maison d'Ailleurs (House of Elswhere), the most important of its kind in Europe. "We are living now in the future imagined by our grandparents," he told Haaretz in a telephone interview from the museum, in Yverdon-les-Bains.

The interview took place just before Gyger's visit to Israel, where he is serving as a judge at the 13th Icon festival of science fiction, fantasy and role-playing, underway at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque now through October 10.

Although visions of flying cars and time machines have not come true, Gyger emphasizes that "for example, mobile phones do not at all surprise me."

Gyger is to give a talk tonight entitled "Memories of the fantastic past" and he will speak at the opening of the exhibit, "Utopia-Dystopia: The creation and destruction of worlds" by designer Christian Lorenz Scheurer, who is also a festival guest.

Gyger, who has directed the Swiss museum for 10 years, established its Jules Verne space, one of the most important exhibitions in the world about the writer, and curates shows dealing with the topics of science fiction, fantasy and utopia.

From 2001 to 2005, he served as artistic director of the Utopiales Festival in France, a significant European science fiction event.

Gyger is a historian specializing in the Middle Ages, and the author of a book about 15th century crime and justice.

"The thought processes involved in history and science fiction are closely related," he says about his career shift. "As a historian you examine evidence and documents, and attempt to create a narrative from them. There are no facts or documents in science fiction, but the beginnings of a story are present. In all science fiction movies, there is a rational relationship between the time in which the movie is set, and the time and place of the viewer. History is hidden. Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road,' for example, tells the story of a man and his son after the world has been destroyed. It hints that a series of historical events have taken place, between our present day and its imagined future."

The Icon festival opened with director Neill Blomkamp's "District 9," produced by Peter Jackson. The story takes place in an alternate South Africa of the 1980s, where a large population of aliens from outer space have become stranded on Earth, and live under terrible conditions in an improvised refugee camp.

"'District 9' is an example of the way science fiction pretends it is about the future when it is really about the past," Gyger says. "What's interesting to me as a historian is that the distortion makes [an effective] pretense of being real. I think the movie is very powerful politically."

Gyger holds that at its best, science fiction does in fact reflect reality. "This is the main difference between science fiction and fantasy," he says. "Fantasy focuses on escapism, while science fiction is always connected to the time in which it is created."

Many recent science fiction narratives are especially paranoid. Is this a way to express our fears?

"Of course. Science fiction is always attentive to the general atmosphere, and to human anxiety. In the 1980s we had the lighthearted film, 'Back to the Future,' but a decade earlier, at a time of economic crisis, the films were quite dark, like Robert Altman's 'Quintet,' which depicts the end of the world. The post-apocalyptic genre isn't new, it comes in cycles, and we're in one now. Gloomy films are much more interesting than lighter ones, in my opinion. The end of the world is highly visual. It's more interesting for a writer or filmmaker than the depiction of a boring utopian narrative."

Gyger agrees that, nonetheless, dark times call for utopian thought.

"There's a strong need for this today. One of the most intriguing utopias right now is that of the permanent environment. There are also techno-utopias and something called the transhumanism movement which is occupied with cyborgs. And the vision which sees human beings achieving a very high technological level is also a kind of utopia."

What are some current subjects in the field?

"In the past, science fiction explored the physical spaces around us. Jules Verne, for example, was occupied with the bottom of the sea, the air, and outer space. The golden age of science fiction took these ideas from Verne and went further with them. There was a tendency to move outward from ourselves, toward our environment. Looking inward started in the 60s and 70s with artificial worlds and virtual spaces. I think we are still trying to explore our mental worlds: how we change, and how we feel with regard to technology. We live in a highly technological world."

What does sci-fi predict about our future?

"People are finding it a little hard right now to grasp the future, because existing technology becomes more and more complex over time. But science fiction is never wrong, because it never tries to be right. Science fiction is filled with attempts to imagine a potential future, present and past. Of the thousands of futures that have been imagined, of course some of the elements were correct, but the core of science fiction is not to understand how the future looks, but rather to shed light on the present."

How do you see the future?

"I picture it in many ways, some of which are contradictory to others. I'm not an optimist by nature, and I don't think we're on our way to an especially rosy future. I think that in the best case, Western society will have to live at a different standard. In the 20th century we were in a situation in which it was easy to go from place to place, and everyone was in possession of no small amount of material goods. But it seems we will have to accept that this era belongs to the past. In the future we will have to understand that there are other ways to live, because our resources are limited. Some of us will have to lower our standard of living, while some will exploit other people. This doesn't mean that we'll all go back to the farm. In any case, this is an interesting time to be alive. We've reached a critical moment, and the next 50 years we'll decide which direction our civilization is moving toward."