Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen

Author:Fred Scharmen [Scharmen, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Space Science, General, Political Science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Social Science, Technology Studies
ISBN: 9781786637352
Google: 2i1GEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57802456
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Although most of the city’s population steps willingly into carrousel, a few go rogue and become “runners,” fleeing the city’s all-knowing computerized brain and its agents, in hopes of finding a mythical resistance movement and a home outside the city in “Sanctuary.” Runners are pursued by “Sandmen,” special police with a license to kill. The film sets up an ongoing dialectic between societies based on constant change and those rooted in a steady-state system. The culture inside the domed city is based on a “renewal,” organized and managed, like all aspects of this world, by a central computer. In the end, the hope for personal rebirth turns out to be mythical. But even though the outside world has been despoiled by constant change and expansionism, it has itself renewed, or so the protagonists find when they escape. This natural renewal is underscored by the figure of the old man they find there among the cities reclaimed by nature—the first person over the age of thirty they’ve ever seen. Growth and expansion are possible after all, the movie seems to say, while steady-state societies lead inherently to decadence and immorality.

The movie reveals a reactionary agenda when it directly critiques the kinds of “different families” that were supported by the cities in the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog. The culture in the book exists without marriage, and its inhabitants engage in free love that crosses gender boundaries, a fact that surprises and repulses the old man outside. In an almost-deliberate nod to the kinds of future that the film exists to critique, the heroes encounter a parallel to the old man, a robot that manages the city’s frozen food infrastructure, deep underground. “Food, food from the sea! Fresh fish, and plankton! From the sea!” the robot, named Box, chants. But, just as in Soylent Green, here they find out that the food it has been preparing is not from ocean farming after all. The malfunctioning robot has been killing other runners and storing them in the deep freeze.

The film version of Logan’s Run doesn’t mention traveling to space, but in the book that it’s based on, Sanctuary is a space station. Sustainable ocean agriculture, steady-state sustainable existence, a turn away from heteronormative nuclear families, and the total organization and control of society with computers, are all presented here as a set of illusions, false hopes, just like the possibility of living in space. Expansion and change is still possible here, in the world of Logan’s Run, but only after you let everything go to hell, then start all over again.

If this is an unintentional set of sequels, all set in the same future timeline, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner would make it a quadrilogy. Released last, in 1982, Blade Runner nevertheless seems to take place in the middle of the sequence. Somewhere between the beginnings of the collapse on Earth seen in Soylent Green, the industrial utilization of space travel in Silent Runnings, and the far future aftermath and renewal of Logan’s Run, the world of Blade Runner is miserable and sublime.

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