The Matrix Not a Metaphor
About 10 years ago, I was preparing to bring a group of innovation practitioners to a massive health care company in Minneapolis to facilitate workshops as part of the enterprise’s annual innovation days event. I had t-shirts made for us all, which featured the iconic green flowing typographic code we all came to know through the Wachowski’s 1999 film, The Matrix.
I had the t-shirts printed with the message: The Matrix is Not a Metaphor. It had become a thought in my head that we were, more and more, living within a technologized environment. Arguably, that’s what The Matrix is about, questions of human freedom and consciousness in the context of the ubiquity of such an environment.
That’s all a long-winded was of proffering a single claim, namely that a handful of important works of fiction are, likewise, not metaphors, but instead urgent exposés on the nature of reality.
The novels I have in mind are:
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
I am sure that one could multiply examples, but I choose these three deliberately, since each is an indictment of an all too present and persistent social evil: of patriarchy and the domination of and violence against women; of the persistence of racial violence and domination rooted in the American practice of enslavement; and the colonized mind that is the invisible and enduring legacy of the violence of colonialism.
The great Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his much too overlooked Profiles of the Future (1962): “reading science-fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead.” His point was that this form of literature ought to become understood and accepted as vital to the work of creating better futures. Consider his loving reference in the forward to the book of Ray Bradbury’s adage: “I don’t try to predict the future — I try to prevent it.”
Atwood specifically disqualified The Handmaid’s Tale from consideration as a work of science-fiction, calling it, instead, speculative fiction: “There’s a precedent in real life for everything in the book. I decided not to put anything in that somebody somewhere hadn’t already done.” And, therefore, such work is as much about history as it is about speculation.
The most important reason to accept my assertion that Atwood, Butler and Le Guin’s writing is not the work of metaphor is to see them all in the service of trying to prevent the continuation of the nightmare’s of sexism, racism and colonialism from extending indefinitely into our futures. To miss this is to mistake their work for mere entertainment rather than as teaching.
I am grateful to Atwood, Butler and Le Guin as teachers, and to my mothers Kay Dila and Franceen Fuger Dila, my sisters Mary and Sophie Dila, to my wife and partner of 30 years, Moira Dossetor, and to my great friend HK Dunston who, in guiding me back to science-fiction, connected me to one of the most vital wellsprings of knowledge and learning in global culture.
