2121: A Tale from the Next Century by Susan Greenfield – review Jul 21st 2013, 10:00
Susan Greenfield's first foray into science fiction fails largely because her agenda drives both plot and character
In the 5th century BC, Socrates railed against the dangers of a disruptive technology for fear that it would nurture "forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories". More recently, take Conrad Gessner – a Swiss scientist troubled by the potential of another innovation for information overload. The cause of Socrates's ire was writing, and for Gessner, it was the 16th-century printing press. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield is part of this ancient tradition.
Following successful careers as a researcher and a populariser, Greenfield has evolved into a figure of great controversy – and sometimes mockery – for persistent vocalisation of her technofears, and simultaneous failure to supply evidence to support her pronouncements, or engage in debate about them. Primarily she has expressed concern about a supposed addiction to various forms of computing. In an emblematic Daily Mail article in 2009 she asked us to imagine "a world without long-term relationships, where people are unable to understand the consequences of their actions or empathise with one another". She goes on to suggest that Twitter and Facebook are steering us in exactly that direction and that "by the middle of this century, our minds might have become infantilised".
None of that should be relevant to her first foray into actual fiction, except that this is explicitly what her debut novel is about. She has saved us the bother of imagining her future dystopia by describing exactly that world for us in 2121, a tale of 22nd-century society that has bifurcated into empathy-free sybarites and logical, stoical, science-loving brainiacs. These worlds collide catastrophically when ultra-rational Fred studies a pleasure-seeking human avatar named Zelda (a nod to the great Nintendo series? I seriously doubt it). They find themselves drawn back from the polar extremes of their cultures to a more human condition as we know it. Zelda develops all sorts of new emotions, a sense of identity, and a mind where previously there was once only a gratification-seeking brain.
Passages in 2121 read like science or even history textbooks. Problematically, Greenfield uses plenty of the same language in her fiction and nonfiction. In both she uses specific phrases, such as a word of her own invention – "mindchange" – the mental equivalent of climate change, with equally apocalyptic consequences.
What an author says in the real world shouldn't affect the way we respond to their virtual creations. But rather than engage in constructive dialogue, for which we have many well established channels, such as publishing one's evidence, Greenfield has chosen to push her agenda again in an incontestable format. The characters and her dystopia are one-dimensional in order to drive Greenfield's broader technophobic narrative, as she explains in an afterword. Unfortunately, that renders the plot and prose like the internet circa 1996 – slow to load and prone to fatal crashes.
Science fiction is always about exploring current fears, but done well, the ideas are woven into stories, not laid out like a scientific paper. 2121 is bogged down by seemingly endless exposition of the world Greenfield has imagined might transpire if we were only to put down our iPhones and climb a tree instead. Screen technologies will change our brains, as every information source does in varying degrees, including the pen, the printing press and the internet. This phenomenon deserves sophisticated thought in science and in fiction. In places, 2121 reads like a science-fiction story by someone who has neither read any, nor used social media. The first few chapters are the epitome of failing to abide by the rule "show, don't tell", a maxim that applies just as much to science as it does to fiction.
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