Dystopian future or reality? (From The Northern Echo)

Dystopian future or reality?

2:28pm Tuesday 20th September 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

I COUNT myself very blessed because I have a wife who supports me, not only in the parish where we work together, but in all the writing work that I do.

If I have an idea for a novel or a short story, I dangle it before her and she has an unerring intuitive faculty by which she will declare, “Yes, that’s not bad” or, alternatively, “That’s ridiculous – chuck it!”

Only once in 30 years have I had cause to question her judgement. Yet, in retrospect, I think she was probably right even on that singular occasion. In about 1986, I started to write a novel in which the two main characters, children, Paul and Lucy, were not real, but sort of cybernetic, on-line virtual creations.

We should recall that this was before the internet and the whole gadgeteered nightmare that has invaded our ordinary lives in the 21st Century. My wife said the novel was too far-fetched and also that it was cruel and heartbreaking. After a moment in which I protested that the virtual world about which I was starting to write would, of necessity, lead to absurd fantasy and cruelty, I abandoned the project and began a novel of an altogether different sort. This was published by Keith Waterhouse’s company and was about my boyhood in a working class suburb of Leeds in the Fifties.

It is called Only A Lad.

But thoughts of the abandoned novel reemerged when I read a national newspaper.

It said:“An online fantasy game ended in tragedy when a teenager accidentally hanged himself. George Darkins, aged 13, was trying to take pictures while pretending to hang himself to kill off his virtual character, and unwittingly strangled himself as he posed.

The inquest was told he had struck up a virtual relationship with a girl online which he wanted to end. However the only way to exit the fantasy according to the rules was to kill off his own character – and he ended up killing himself.”

This is the world we now inhabit – the world I felt a horrible premonition about back in the Eighties: a world in which we do not always know the difference between reality and illusion. In my early sketches for that novel about Paul and Lucy, I even had phrases which now ring terribly true, such as: “To be is to be seen when reality is a screen.” Mind you, I’m still glad I took my wife’s advice and stopped writing that book.

I think I would have frightened myself.

But now the full horror of it is with us. People live out their lives online. Kids spend hours alone in their bedrooms playing sadistic fantasy games. Adults in their millions watch so called “reality television” which has about as much connection with reality as the backside of an imaginary pumpkin.

People who look grown up, but who are in fact totally infantilised, block and hinder the ordinary traffic of our pavements because they are not actually living in the real world, but wandering aimlessly, oblivious to real people around them, talking the most inane twaddle and jabber on their portable phones.

Just because something is slick and smooth and slips into your pocket doesn’t mean that that thing adds one ounce of value to human life. Gadgets may be useful – in their proper place – but the only thing that adds value to human life is the genuine, involved physical presence of real humans.

Poor little George Darkins. Did it have to come to this – just because we are all so childishly entrapped by this virtual reality?