"He controls from the future!"
Bendis and company make us realize that the Singularity, should it ever arrive, might well be the most horrendous of moments in human history. One of my favourite science fiction writers, Robert Charles Wilson, released a book a few years back called The Chronoliths, about what seemed to be an invasion, more prophetic than violent, from the future. And why not? If the technology is there, why not rule from a place that a less technologically-advanced society can't access?
I'm certainly not saying that this is a new idea - we've seen it a number of times in comics. Morrison's Seven Soldiers, Hickman and Pitarra's The Red Wing, situations where the movement backwards and forwards through time offers opportunity for conquest. What differentiates Age of Ultron slightly is that Ultron is conquering from the future but knows that the conquered also have the capacity to travel in time. For his plan to succeed, it's not a matter of attacking somewhere without similar technology, but of not letting that place/time know from where it's being attacked.
And so, spoiler alert, Luke Cage and She-Hulk die to get some damning information. Which, in turn, leads to a concept fairly alien to us, if not also to the characters who want to attempt it: the erasure of an idea.
First, let me just say that the suggestion of the historical erasure of an idea by an imaginary person is just a lovely little bit of reality-play. Looking back at the Morrisonian revelation to Animal Man, without Ultron, these characters, these particular iterations of these characters, would not exist, in that the comic series, which itself defines the existence of these imaginary people, would not have happened. Now, this is a paradox that they themselves will likely realize - erasing Ultron from existence will necessarily erase the timeline they inhabit, and there will, I'm assuming (it's been a while since I've read the series), be debate over the ramifications of such an action. This is where something like literature emblematizes that Frygian notion of the imaginative being somewhere where we work out different iterations of society/reality, and in this case, where we work out situations and problems that are, for the time being, purely theoretical. What does time travel look like? What problems and opportunities will it present once we understand how to do it?
Okay, I'm rambling now. It's like when I was teaching last term and trying not to spoil books that I knew my students hadn't finished. But in this case, I won't bow to the pedagogical pressure. We'll get to it when we get to it, over the next few days.
2015 has been insane. A year ago I was in the depths. Now, I've crawled out of them, and stand facing the peaks I've been glimpsing in the distance for some time now. 2016 is going to be interesting. See you there.
No comments:
Post a Comment