The Ugly Origins of Futurism And Its Impact On Science Fiction

A time traveler arrives in the distant future of 2015, where edgy cars can fly and land safely on the streets. He looks around, admiring the high-tech buildings and people in vibrant clothing. The theater announces the exhibition of Jaws 19 with a hologram of a shark attack.

This classic scene from Back to the Future - Part II encapsulates all of our past hopes and dreams for the millennium to come. The future imagined by the 20th century people has a remarkably recognizable aesthetic. Silver seems to be the color of tomorrow, and hoverboards are a viable means of transportation.

In the ideal future of last century’s dreamers, humankind has complete control over the environment. Our troubles are societal, not environmental.

However, if you travel further back in time, say, to the late 1800s, you’ll notice that the vision for the future was rooted in wild adventures. Technological wonders looked exquisitely surreal against the unimaginative background.

The future of the 19th century was the mundane world with eye-catching mechanical machines.

How did the visions of the future change so much in just a few years?

Comaprison between artistic portrayal of the future: mechanical machines in ordinary life vs. futuristic reimagining of the world. — "France En L'An 2000" by Jean-Marc Côté vs. Futuristic city: the future thought in the years 1900 and 1950, repectively.

It all started in 1909 in one of the most beautiful countries on Earth: Italy. This was the birthplace and date of the artistic movement called Futurism: an ode to dynamism, machinery, velocity, and everything associated with progress at that time. It included a reimagining of ordinary life as an industrialized existence.

Despite its natural beauty, early 20th-century Italy had something really ugly about it. At that moment, fascism was on the rise, and the Manifesto of Futurism, the inaugural document of this artistic movement written by Italian poet Fillip Tommaso Marinetti, is tainted with ideas of this ideology.

The Manifesto of Futurism

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism.

This is a passage from the English translation of the Manifesto of Futurism.

The document presents the artistic philosophy of the movement in eleven principles, setting the scene for the futuristic aesthetic we recognize today.

Marinetti said that, up to that point, art had focused on immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. The future, according to him, should be aggressively active, perpetrated by feverish insomnia and audacity, courageous and violent.

Yes, violent. The whole manifesto is war propaganda.

The 9th principle said, “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for…” (keep these ellipses in mind; we’ll come back to them in a moment.)

A line from the 7th principle, “Except in struggle, there is no more beauty,” captures the essence of this combative sentiment.

Moreover, the manifesto asks the reader to forget the past; the future is our own to make, and to look backward would teach us nothing.

“Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.”

This principle reveals one of Marinetti’s inspirations. A few years prior, in 1905, Albert Einstein had suggested that time and space are relative to the observer, shattering the classical, millenary view of these concepts. This clear-cut of Einstein’s views with classical mechanics incited a revolution in physics—and, apparently, in art, too.

The rejection of the past came with cries to burn museums (deemed the cemeteries of world history), libraries, and academia of every kind. This anti-intellectualism agenda is one of the most dangerous traits of the fascist ideology.

Remember the ellipses on the 9th principle? That paragraph that begins with “We glorify…” ends with “...scorn of the woman.” This manifesto clearly states that feminism (and moralism) is a threat that should be eradicated.

In fact, this call for action against minority groups was accompanied by the expectation that the attacked groups would fight back, playing into the violent ideal the manifesto was promoting.

“They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.”

So, yeah.

Futurism and Science Fiction

Despite being more associated with the visual arts, Futurism started as a literary cry. Marinetti wanted the literature world to follow progress to keep its relevance.

The chromatic reinvention of the future (large buildings, conveyor belts, flying cars, artificial cities that never sleep, and so on) was compatible with the scientific and technological revolution taking place, so it is no wonder that this movement influenced the sci-fi genre, which was on track to becoming more popular in the early 20th century.

The aesthetics really made an impact on our vision of the future, but, more than that, the ideals brought forward by the Manifesto of Futurism also can be spotted in some of the early tales of the pulp magazines. Space explorations were often imagined as conquering enterprises, and military organizations featured prominently within the genre. Many of these stories have an outdated view of society and lean toward violence and oppression.

You see, this is how influence works: exposure to something—an entrancing painting, touching music, a line of a poem, a quote from a speech, a new environment, or even routine chores—can lead to a deep feeling that stays with you. It becomes you.

Influence often happens subconsciously.

I am willing to bet that most sci-fi authors have never read or heard about Marinetti’s manifesto. Its content is so problematic that many writers wrote it as the dystopian future it represents, like Ray Bradbury in his acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451. This book has a futuristic portrayal of society, but it is a cautionary tale about the fascist ideals present at the inception of Futurism.

Fortunately, because we don’t need to subscribe to a controversial philosophy to be positively inspired by something. Sci-fi writers reclaimed the word “Futurism” as a mostly welcomed term of hope, one that invokes the idea of a better place for humankind.