I’ve been surprised to find myself re-reading, after god knows how many years, the massive Titan science fiction trilogy by John Varley. Berkeley Original paperbacks from 1985. The three books (Titan, Wizard and Demon) weren’t even side by side on my bookshelves, but their broad spines beckoned. How come?

Oh yeah: I recently visited Disneyland. That’s why.

You can spare me the standard eye-rollage about Disneyland. I was there with my six year old daughter and four year old son, okay? That makes it wonderful. You can only get the true sense of the place if you’re accompanied by children. I went there begrudgingly, with a bandolier of cynicism and ironic remove, but my judgmental  attitudes were washed out by the klieg lights of my children’s happiness. I still have a lot of ambivalence about playing so completely into the hands of a massive corporation, known for shameless manipulation and churning out glurge. But until you point me to that open-source, communal and free theme park (Burningmanland?), Disneyland is not only without peer, but without alternative.

What does that have to do with reading an science fiction trilogy? Tomorrowland. In 2009, that’s the saddest corner of the happiest place on earth.

To put it mildly, they’ve let Tomorrowland go. Gone are the PeopleMover, the Skyway cars, the Adventure Through Inner Space, the Rocket to The Moon (later Mars), the immersive Circarama Theater, the House of Tomorrow and the Carousel of Progress. In their place: a pizza restaurant, a shoot -’em-up based on Toy Story, a creakingly antique Stars Wars ride simulator. The Carousel of Progress building still rotates, but for no particular reason. Once inside you wander through displays of 1997-era technology from corporate sponsors. Really, they were proudly demoing a Yamaha Silent Guitar, as an instance of the “musical instruments of the future.” I’ve had one of those, mostly living under my bed, for seven years now.

The rest of Disneyland still delivers. But Tomorrowland is as nihilistic as Johnny Rotten singing the no future chorus on “God Save The Queen”. Just a lot of abandoned concrete, a few children’s toys, and churro stands. There’s Space Mountain (a roller coaster in the dark) and a shrill 3D movie called “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience”, but nothing that even pretends to present a sense of what the future might have in store. Buzz Lightyear is cool, but he’s a toy, not an astronaut. It’s like going to Frontierland and encountering not Davy Crockett, but The Adventures of Coonskin Cap.

Let me make my point clear. I’m not pretending that Tomorrowland needs to provide an accurate, or even desirable, vision of the future. Its once-considerable hold on the imagination derived not from making tidy straight-line connections, but loose threads of multiple possibilities—letting those threads run, brightly and enticingly, through the vagueness that is a child’s conception of the future. The excitement came not from believing this stuff would come true, but that the future was large enough to encompass the possibility of it becoming real.

Now Tomorrowland has, in effect, been invaded and annexed by Fantasyland. It raises no possibilities whatsoever. The Submarine Voyage used to be a trip under the polar icecaps. Now it’s a trip to the video store, to check out an especially High Def version of Finding Nemo.

That set me, subliminally at least, to my bookshelves for a necessary dose of real riffing on the implications of the future. John Varley’s Titan trilogy is about as dystopian as you can get. It’s mostly set inside a giant created being, floating off Saturn and massive enough to host large populations of humans and engineered lifeforms within. The added twist is that the host organism, millions of years old, is going insane. It won a shelf-load of Hugos and Nebulas and the like.
It’s preposterous, in the best sense of the world, meaning it’s not just a straight-line extrapolation of today, but one that takes the necessary unexpected turns. It’s bizarre, but very meticulously not fantasy. There are centaurs and zombies and other fantastical creatures that one might associate with fantasy, but they’re products of genetic engineering. And that’s Varley’s main riff: there’s enough incredible stuff happening right now to make the future more interesting than any fantasy. There’s nothing about it that’s a “prediction” of the future, any more than Tomorrowland at its height was making a “prediction”.

Tomorrowland wasn’t really about the future of the years 1987, or 2017, or 2100. It was about the future of the years past eighteen. Its message used to be: It will be fun to be an adult. That’s a pretty important message to deliver to six year olds, when you think about it. Buzz Lightyear, for all his space-cadet trappings, belongs to the sandbox universe. It’s a toy. If it has any powers, it’s to accumulate nostalgia for the past, not to pull us into the inchoate mechanisms of the future. Tomorrowland, wherever it manifests—in Anaheim, on movie screens, in books—needs to throw off the oppressive yoke of Fantasyland. Once upon a time is a magical incantation, of course. But so is When I grow up.

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11.05.09 § 0