Do Humans Dream of Analogue Sheep? The construction of memories in SF and archaeology
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-24

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ The past is a made thing, and those that make it can covertly or overtly create feelings of nostalgia, familiarity, fear, kinship; a range of powerful, and politically useful, emotional responses. Just as archaeological interpretations politicise the past, science fiction politicises the future. Then there is the nexus of these ideas – where science fiction presents the politicised past as a facet of our future. From Orwellian totalitarian parables to Philip K. Dick’s long-term grapple with the nature of consciousness, science fiction is used as a lens to explore the nature of how heritage and memory are used to generate an imagined time, of a toxic nostalgia that feeds into the base instincts of human behaviour. This paper will look at the constructed past, the imagined future, and the intricate construction of future-pasts, and how these are all used to manipulate the memory and generate emotive interaction with current, past, and future affairs. 

Penelope Foreman (Bournemouth University)