Program Schedule

8643. A United Earth: Science Fiction's Long Legacy Portraying the Political Unification of Humanity and the Abolition of War
Solo Panel: Tad Daley

I started devouring science fiction when I was a kid. I dug it because it offered both rollicking good yarns and fascinating speculations about the vistas of human possibility. And I discovered, too, almost in passing, that many science fiction works, both in literature and in film, contained something like a world state, a world government, a politically and constitutionally unified human race. Often this wasn't even what the story was about. It was just a background component of the fictional future universe created by the author. And almost always, it had an inherent plausibility to it. "A couple hundred years in the future? Of course we will have managed to abolish war by then. Of course we'll have a unified human race by then."

So in this presentation, I will examine a world state as a major theme in the long history of science fiction - dating as far back as H.G. Wells and continuing to contemporary authors like Ada Palmer and Becky Chambers. In some cases I will examine something larger still, such as the galactic states seen in landmark works like Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, and the 1951 film The Day The Earth Stood Still. And I will finally consider why, when brilliant science fiction writers can make this development seem so believable, so desirable, and so inevitable, real-world political thinkers like me are dismissed as hopelessly utopian when we assert that we might chart a course toward the political unity of the human race as an actual historical goal.
Tad Daley
SAT 8:00 pm - 9:15 pm, Los Angeles C

Program Schedule

Scheduled as of 0000-00-00 00:00:00