“Is it now?”, asks a nervous Agatha (Samantha Morton), one of the trio of ‘pre-cognitives’ who predict the future, specifically, murders in the future, in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). “What is real, Neo?”, asks the philosophical Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), leader of the rebels fighting in a war against machines that feed off humans as a power supply in the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). “We now have discrimination down to a science”, informs the ‘de-gene-erate’ Vincent (Ethan Hawke) as he arrives for work as a cleaner at the genetically exclusive space research and exploration centre in Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997). These films were released around the turn of the century, indeed, the turn of the millennium, at a time when the human world was either biting its nails in anticipation of a potential global catastrophe due to computer error as the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve, 1999, or, two years later, reeling at the horror of terrorism broadcast onto every television screen around the world as hijacked airline passenger planes pierced the walls of America’s icons of economic supremacy, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Each film, having received considerable attention from critics and academics as texts of science fiction, whilst exhibiting the nova of a time in advance of their actual production, depict an unfavourable future based on contemporary concerns and anxieties. While each film takes a different approach and presents a different scenario of what might be, they are all, in one way or another, concerned with issues of political control and corruption, surveillance and privacy, technology and reproduction, Artificial Intelligence and discrimination, self-existence and self-determination. These films are asking us to open our eyes, not to see into the future per se, but to look at where we are today and what might happen if we remain blind to the various issues and concerns which shape who we are and how we operate as a society. By doing so, they evince the proposition that science fiction, while seeming to be about the future, is most often about the present and the role of the individual in present day society.

The Twentieth Century was a century that had witnessed the transition from an Industrial revolution to a widespread adoption of technological advances and developments which were once only visions penned by the likes of H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick or William Gibson. It was a century that saw a move from modernism to postmodernism, humanism to posthumanism. It gave birth to ‘rock’n’roll’; it gave birth to ‘punk’; it gave birth, perhaps by caesarean section, to ‘cyberpunk’. It was a century that, mid-stream, gave birth to a generation, colloquially known as the ‘baby boomers’, who grew their hair, discovered paisley, LSD and marijuana, and asserted as a whole “I am me!” It was a century that saw a mushroom cloud of radioactivity bloom above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a century that exposed genocide and political corruption, while communism collapsed and capitalism expanded. It was a century whose ending saw the beginning of a new age of humanity connected via the World Wide Web, watching wide-screen television, speaking or ‘texting’ by way of wireless technology, and achieving sexual gratification through ‘webcams’ and ‘virtual simulation’. It was a century that witnessed the introduction of immunisation against disease, and the cloning of sheep. The last two decades of this century also saw the growth of a new organism – globalisation – a ‘new world order’, or as Gibson (1995, p. 129) writes in his short story, ‘New Rose Hotel’, “Corporation as life form”. By the end of this century, the ‘I am me’ generation had given birth to a generation that was asking “who am I?”

This questioning of identity and the position of the individual in society, coined by Foust and Soukup (2006, p. 128) as a “postindustrial reality crisis”, has been a common theme in many recent films, including The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and American Psycho (2000). But it is science fiction which, by removing us from the present, by making, as Olsen (1992, p.1) claims, “our world strange…allows us to see our universe anew”. Science fiction takes us into the future to look back at the present. Csicsery-Ronay (cited in Roberts 2000, p. 35) argues that science fiction has become “a mode of awareness about the world”. Science fiction, Roberts (2000, pp. 35-36) agrees, “does not project us into the future; it relates to us stories about our present”. It is science fiction more than any other genre which alienates us and, as Olsen (1992, p. 1) claims, confronts us with otherness, with alien characters and landscapes”, enabling us to realise, to see, how alienated we have become from ourselves. In Minority Report, Agatha repeatedly asks the ‘Pre-Crime’ operative-cum-fugitive, Anderton (Tom Cruise): “Can you see?”. In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves), having just been rescued from his ‘battery’ cell, asks: “Why do my eyes hurt?” Morpheus replies: “You’ve never used them before”. In Gattaca, when censured by his supervisor for spending too long cleaning a glass wall that separates him from his dream of becoming an astronaut, Vincent says: “If the glass is clean, it will be easier for you to see me when I’m on the other side of it”. The questions being posed by these films are, as Friedman (2003, p. 4) suggests: “How does one see? What does one see? How do we understand what we see – or think we see?”

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