Obsession with the Present

Despite the fact that the events of Nova take place in the thirty second century, we see constant references back to the twentieth century especially, and the centuries prior to that. For example, Che-ong was anxious to hear “nineteenth century Turkish music” (72); at Taafite we see thirteenth century Nigerian art, and a house that is modelled after a twenty first century American mansion(188-190).

There is some justification for this within the parameters of the book itself. Regarding the obsession with twentieth century culture, for example Cyanna Morgan says that no other time period since then has humanity been transformed to such an extent, seeing as how “at the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end:... an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds”.

What about the obsession with thirteenth and nineteenth century culture, and everything in between? That was explained by the lack of cultural solidarity and originality, that is supposedly caused by the mobility of the population in this imagined future. According to one university student, the thirty second century is “an age where economic, political and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition....there’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity” (46) This theory is fleshed out further, when Katin explains near the end of the book that with the advent of plug-in jobs and cyborg technology, and the “the ease with which men and women can work now, anywhere they want, there have been such movements of peoples from world to world in the past dozen generations that society has wholly fragmented around itself” (220). Without communities staying put in one place, apparently, it is theorized that it is impossible to formulate culture, or social tradition. Culture is so rare that in the book, people can only remember one time when original thought did flourish, in Vega (102).

However, Katin argues that while there isn’t social tradition in the sense that people are familiar with, there is a new cultural tradition that he sees in Mouse, a sort of intergalactic culture (analogous to a global culture in our time), in which Mouse “collected the ornamentations a dozen societies have left...over the ages and made them inchoately [his]”.

I feel, however, outside the context of the book, the obsession of this future society is a necessity for two reasons. The first and more obvious one is that since this society is an imagined future of our current society in the twentieth century, the only viable history that the author can come up with is existing history, that is, up to the twentieth century. So for that reason, if he wishes to discuss history’s impact on this future society in an accurate way, the best way really is to draw on our own history, and our present, to avoid the inevitable contradictions that come with imagining a whole new history.

The second reason is one that I am borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s Progress Vs. Utopia. There, he says that the main goal of science fiction isn’t simply to present a possible future, but rather to help us in “apprehending the present as history” (153), by offering it to us “in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered” (152). So in this way, Nova is a way of meditating on our present, and the obsession with present culture is a way of making us realize just how important our culture is to our identity. Like Katin says, “a novel....is always a historical projection of its own time” (128).