Editorial
Welcome to the future
They talk about the past. They talk about its comforts and pleasures, and the surprises and the mysteries that shaped their childhoods. They reimagine their memories, scaling them up to fit the adult frame. A day trip becomes an interplanetary voyage. A father’s hands, lifting and catching, become the harness of a jetpack.
Or they talk about tomorrow: a place from which they are forever barred. Tomorrow is a threatening prospect: sooner or later, it will be the first day in the history of the world that does not contain them. By projecting themselves into the future, they dream their way around their own death.
Or they talk about what the world would be like if today was to continue ad nauseam
– today’s politics, today’s problems, today’s prejudices. This is where science fiction’s dystopias come from: they are the mirror images of our own anxiety-ridden faces.
Of course, the future will not be like today. Nor will it be like the past. It will not be like life in exile, or on a colony ship. It will not be like childhood. It will be like the future.
Arc
is our attempt to talk about the future – in some of those old ways, and in some new ways too. We don’t claim to know how that’s best done. No matter how detailed our plans, they will always be confounded; no matter what we expect, we will always be wrong. Because the future holds all the jokers; the future always wins.
The problem is insurmountable, so we throw everything at it. Articles and travelogues. Stories and speculations. Calls to action. Here and there, a voice or two of calm. A collection of mistakes: some glorious, some wild, some forgivable, others inevitable, and a couple, no doubt, that will prove downright foolish.
We don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know how we’ll get there. There are no maps, the brakes don’t work, the driver’s blind and the doors have no handles.
Enjoy the ride.
Simon Ings
Managing Editor
Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Editor-in-Chief