Blog Post 2: What are the apocalyptic fiction stories trying to tell us about our own futures?

Connecting the real world to Bradbury's short story adaptation of the poem There Will Come Soft Rains and E.M. Forster's story The Machine Stops, I noticed that many of the stories we read were apocalyptic fiction, and seemed to be dealing with issues that our society and world are dealing with now, but these stories were published way before these issues were even present. I started wondering, why? What do these stories know about our own futures that we don't realize? 

While Bradbury's story was in fact published in the 1950's, the Cold War was going on in the background of American lives and was prominent for the ever-looming nuclear apocalypse. I don't think Bradbury expected that now, in the 21st century, we would be dealing with a larger threat than just a Cold War level nuclear arsenal, but thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons around the world. It does seem that Bradbury's story was ahead of its time, shown by the fact that even the house was futuristic, and seemed to be powered by artificial intelligence, which we may also be heading towards, but the fact that nuclear apocalypse was on his mind during the 1950's shows how much that idea has changed, as at any second now there could be a nuclear attack that ends up wiping out not just a country, but continents itself, maybe forcing people to move underground to be safe from the harmful radiation.

This leads me to Forster's The Machine Stops. This story was originally published in 1909, which was well before the nuclear threat existed anywhere on the planet, and surely a long time before the idea that people would need to relocate anywhere underground was even an idea. I think looking at the story now, we can relate it to the idea of a nuclear fallout covering the whole world and having to seek shelter for many years to avoid the radiation. While this was not the intended idea behind Forster's story, I think relating it to our own futures might be a good way to look at it from a 21st century perspective, compared to an early 20th century perspective that doesn't have the presence of nuclear arms.

Is connecting these stories to our real 21st century futures a bit of a stretch? Yes, of course it is, these authors knew nothing about where the world would truly be heading. Is looking at these stories from a 21st century reader's perspective a bad idea though? Not one bit. I believe that stories like this are all about the reader, not the author, because you can write something in the past and believe it is fiction, but in due time, it may turn out to be fact.