Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
A good portion of the value of classic literature comes the fact that it was written for their times and their audiences. (The rest is storytelling and entertainment.) Actively trying to write for a future audience is as silly as trying to write for aliens. It is pretentious and self-defeating.
Just look to how silly the futurists of the past look today with the retro futures they conceived, trying to guess what life would be like mere decades ahead; most of the things they thought would be important are, at most, of secondary importance. Conversely, the forces that are truly molding the present day--both technologically and sociopolitically--were blithely ignored.
Writing for a future that will never come to pass is like packing a time capsule with survivalist food supplies. At best it tells the future what you were thinking, at worst it delivers a moldy mess.
The best way to address the future is by dealing with the issues of today and trying to leave the world incrementally better than we found it. The future will deal with its own concerns in due time.
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That's all very interesting (though not all true), but I fail to see how it is relevant. If the intention of the project was to somehow solve future problems and share some world-changing, important information, then it is not a suitable method at all. But that doesn't seem to be their intention at all. It is more of an experiment into how literature written now with the future generations in mind would be received by them, presumably to be assessed by future sociologists, anthropologists and/or historians who document and analyse the history of literature.
It is different to seeing how texts written now are received by future generations for the very reason that the classics we read now have been read, written about, talked about, analysed and over-analysed, and assessed - so when I started Moby Dick, I knew the impact it had had on the development of literature, which immediately changed how I read it. If I read a book now written a 100 years ago that has never been seen, and I go in with no preconceptions or ideas about the interpretations of others, that would be a very different experience. I think that the idea behind the Future Library is to have this experience, rather than having some narrow utilitarian function or goal such as bringing about world peace. I think they even refer to the project as "artwork".
Not to everyone's interest of course, but personally, I like the different ideas and concepts that this project raises for me.