The Apocalyptic Vision of Philip K. Dick

By Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
Homepage: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
Curriculum Vitae: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/DK97CV.htm
Best homepage: http://www.utep.edu/philos/best.htm

The past several decades have exhibited vertiginous change, surprising novelties, and upheaval in an era marked by technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism. This "great transformation," comparable in scope to the shifts produced by the Industrial Revolution, is moving the world into a postindustrial, infotainment, and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new information, communications, and genetic technologies. The postmodern adventure involves leaving behind the assumptions and procedures of modern theory and embracing a dynamic and ongoing encounter with emergent theories, sciences, technologies, cultural forms, communications media, experiences, politics, and identities. It involves the traversal and exploration of emerging social and cultural spaces, alive with fresh possibilities for thought, action, and personal and social change. The adventure is also fraught with distractions and dangers, and challenges accepted types of thought and behavior. Postmodern adventures call for altering definitions of natural, social, and human reality, and require innovative modes of representation, mapping, and practice.

The scientific-technological-economic revolutions of the era and spread of the global economy are providing new financial opportunities, openings for political amelioration, and a wealth of ingenious products and technologies that might improve the human condition. Yet these developments may lead to explosive conflict, crisis, even catastrophe. Hence, the turbulent transmutations of the current condition are highly contradictory and ambiguous, with both hopeful and threatening features being played out on political, economic, social, and cultural fronts. Consequently, critical social theory should adopt a "dialectics of the present" standpoint that deploys a multiplicity of optics to attempt to capture the complexity and conflicts of the contemporary era. A critical theory of the new millennium would combine social theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies in a multiperspectivist and transdisciplinary framework that illuminates the dynamics of the emerging social and cultural system. Confronting the turbulence, excitement, and unpredictability of the day immerses us in what we are calling "the postmodern adventure."

The concept of the postmodern adventure is deployed in our studies to describe engagement with the striking metamorphoses and the contentious controversies over how to characterize the vicissitudes of the present era. Whereas Alfred North Whitehead (1967) charts the trajectories of Western culture through various "adventures of ideas," we argue that fundamental changes stem first and foremost from material transformations in the domains of science, technology, and economics. The postmodern adventure involves leaving behind the assumptions and procedures of modern theory and embracing a dynamic and ongoing encounter with emergent theories, sciences, technologies, cultural forms, communications media, experiences, politics, and identities. It requires the traversal and exploration of emerging social and cultural spaces, alive with fresh possibilities for thought, action, and personal and social change. The adventure is also fraught with distractions and dangers, and contests accepted types of thought and behavior. Postmodern adventures call for altering definitions of natural, social, and human reality, and developing innovative modes of representation, mapping, and practice.

Capturing the dynamics, novelties, and conflicts of the postmodern adventure requires diverse types of representations, including theory and science, art and media culture, quantitative and qualitative, descriptive and normative, ethical and political, and utopian and dystopian modes. We argue that multiple chartings are relevant, indeed necessary, for distinct domains of social reality and specific social contexts, and that it is thus a pragmatic question concerning which modes of representation should be used in particular constellations. Contemporary maps of the new technoculture and configurations of global capitalism would do well to deploy the resources of both "theory" and "fiction," since each provides key illuminations of social experience from different vantage points that supplement and complement each other. Because of their unique ability to dramatize present and future conditions of social life, science fiction maps are indispensable to critical theory and cultural studies.

While critical social theory provides maps of constellations of class, race, and gender within analysis of dominant social relations and the major constituents of social systems, science fiction (SF) portrays radical otherness and discontinuity, modes of representation appropriate to the postmodern adventure that unfolds in the space between modernity and a new era. Indeed, with increasingly surreal scientific and technological developments -‚ ranging from frozen embryos and transgenic species to cloned animals and space travel -- the distance between science fiction and science fact is collapsing. Few writers have captured this algamation as vividly as Philip K. Dick, whose farsighted writings embody powerful visions of a high-tech world collapsing boundaries between technology and the human. He portrays tendencies in the present that will lead to future affliction, forecasts entropic decay of nature and society, and dissolves society and reality into grotesque configurations, in which ordinary categories of space, time, and reality are ruptured. Dick drafts fantastic technological worlds with strange forms of media culture and art, simulacra, and a collapse of the boundaries of modernity that anticipate conceptions of hyperreality, implosion, and simulation in later French postmodern theory, such as Baudrillard and Virilio.

An apocalyptic imagination emerged after World War Two which accompanied the genesis of postwar SF, politics, and culture. After Hiroshima, people were haunted by fears of nuclear annihilation, as visible in popular literature and media culture of the day. In particular, science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick, Bernard Wolfe, J.G. Ballard, and others attempted to imagine and represent the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, the greatest conceivable catastrophic event ever unleashed by and upon the human species.

Ironically, while science and technology are key driving forces of the postmodern adventure, skepticism toward them has decisively shaped contemporary culture and consciousness. The decline in grand narratives of progress that Lyotard (1984) popularized and promoted is grounded in severe questioning of the forces of science, technology, and Enlightenment as instruments of social advancement and enrichment. Throughout the modern era, science and technology have been taken as the primary vehicles of progress, as the major promoters of human well-being, and as prime social goods. The loss of faith in them ensues in part from the perceived dangers to the human species resulting from uncontrolled industrial-technological overdevelopment. In particular, highly destructive military technology and the creation of societies of bureaucratic domination and manipulation raise questions as to whether science and technology are really instruments of progress and emancipation or domination and destruction.

The explosion of the atom bomb and subsequent development of a deadly nuclear arsenal which could destroy the world was the great catalyst in questioning the value of science and technology and the modern civilization they produced. The possibility of the destruction of the human species and life on earth promoted an apocalyptic imagination that portrayed the human species coming an end. Cautionary warnings concerning potential misuse of science and technology have become a defining feature of the best imaginative fiction of our time.

Indeed, it is novelists like Thomas Pynchon, SF classics like H.G. Wells and Dick, and cyberpunks that best come to terms with the consequences of science and technology and the earth-shattering transformations that we are undergoing. Thus, to supplement and illustrate the ideas of a critical theory of science and technology, one should go not only to sociological theory, and science/technology studies, but also to visionary writers, especially the masters of science fiction. Arguably, literature can powerfully and concretely embody representations of the products and effects of technoscience, what it does to human beings, how humans and technology implode, and what novel environments and modes of life science and technology are creating. Since so-called high-tech is itself the embodiment of a futuristic imagination that is in many ways quite fantastic, SF writers best capture the drama, the texture, the look and feel, and the impact of technology on human beings. SF is thus an avant-garde form of the postmodern adventure, a mode highly suited to representation of new forms of science, technology, and technocapitalism.

While H.G. Wells carried through a crucial science-fiction breakthrough, Philip K. Dick emerges in our reading as the poet laureate of the postmodern adventure, in his bleak and brilliant portrayals of the future of global capitalism, interplanetary space travel and colonization, and the merging of humans and technology. Dickís stories and novels pursue the SF logic of "what if?" -- taking a premise about current social development and following through to its possible conclusions. Eschewing the hard science approach of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlen, Dick was more interested than other SF writers of his time in the imaginative possibilities, the philosophical interrogation of reality, the human and social values confronting individuals, and in warnings against future catastrophes of the human species and natural world.

Astonishingly prolific, amazingly inventive, and always visionary, Dick, in his best works, attempts to measure the fallout of a proliferating technological society and to project foreboding visions of possible futures, as he extrapolates from contemporary economic, technological, political, and cultural developments. Like cyberpunk, which he anticipates and influenced, Dick sets his fantasies within a world drawn from contemporary configurations of global capitalism and the Cold War. His writings reveal deep fears of war, social breakdown, nuclear armageddon, and military technology and political tensions escalating out of control. He portrays a future in which demagogues use media culture to manipulate and dominate underlying masses of people, and where the development of cybernetic systems results in a society where humans are mastered by machines, technology, and in some cases superior species. Hence, the collapse of humans and technology and a posthuman threat to individuals in technocapitalism are core themes of Dick's work.

Typically, Dick's narratives do not have happy endings. Deeply disturbed with German fascism, he often sketches out totalitarian societies ruled by demagogues and authoritarians. More prescient than other writers of his day in regard to the dynamics of global capitalism, Dick portrays corporate forces using technology to exploit and control the underlying population. Further, he was one of the first SF writers to explore a new virtual technoculture, in which the distinction between reality and illusion, the real and the virtual, implodes.

The strong undercurrents of pessimism in Dick's work respond to Cold War conformity and stabilization in his 1950s and early 1960s writings, and then to the defeat of the counterculture, of which he was a precursor and participant, by the 1970s. While characters in his writings often manage to see through the socially-manufactured illusions that stabilize the oppressive societies depicted, they are usually unable to do anything, and their revolt appears futile. Nuclear apocalypse haunts his work, and Cold War geopolitics are in the background of his novels that display ordinary people threatened by political and technological forces beyond their understanding and control.

Whereas in the Star Trek sagas, and for scientists and visionaries like Carl Sagan, space travel is an object of poetic rapture, portrayed as the next stage in the drama of human evolution, for Dick it is inherently ambiguous and potentially catastrophic. Although both contrasting perspectives on the future see space travel as an inevitable outgrowth of science, technology, industry, and capitalism, Dick has grave worries about space technologies in the historical context of nuclear weapons, Cold War rivalries, global power politics, and predatory capitalism. Dick's epics of space colonialism, like Martian Time-Slip (1964), depict class hierarchies and forms of political and technological domination developed on Earth replicated in the space colonies. His novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge (1965) shows colonizers becoming addicted to drugs to overcome the bleak conditions of life on other planets.

Moreover, the aliens who populate his voluminous short stories and novels are rarely benign. Sagan, of course, imagines alien intelligence in positive ways in the manner of Steven Spielberg, while the Star Trek saga projects narratives which imply that worldly class, gender, race, and power issues can be transcended at escape velocity. Dick, by contrast, portrays alien species who threaten to dominate and destroy humans, as well as depicting humans producing new species and technology that might also overpower and devastate them in societies that combine gender, race, and class hierarchies and oppression.

Whereas the technocratic imaginary of our time sees technology as a force of inevitable human progress, Dick is deeply skeptical of the impact of technology, especially when it is in the hands of dark and destructive social groups, like, in his perception, the police, the military, or corrupt politicians. To give an example of fears of military technology going out of control from the treasure-house Dick's early short stories, his 1952 fable "The Gun" deals with a space ship encountering a strange planet giving off intense nuclear radiation. As the ship draws close to the planet, the crew sees what appears to be a destroyed city and are shot at and forced to land. The crew is horrified at the evidence of intraspecies war and looks around and finds a gun programmed to shoot at any intruder. The desolate planet seems devoid of life and appalled at the indiscriminate violence generated by this weapon, they disable the gun and discover a cache of literature, films, and cultural artifacts below the surface. As they philosophize over how terrible the destruction of this planet was, we too are led to imagine the possible demise of our own earth with its rich cultures and biodiversity. The crew is then startled to observe the emergence of robotic carts loaded with repair material and an atomic warhead moving toward the destroyed gun, evoking an image of a cybernetic military apparatus ready to repair the gun, a self-perpetuating technological system dedicated to interminable war and destruction.

Dick's 1952 story "Second Variety," which was made into the movie Screamers in 1996, presents as well a barren post-nuclear war landscape, in which the two surviving superpowers continue in futile warfare on earth and its colonies. The U.S. forces have created a type of robotic weapon, much like the insectoid smart machines used to explore Mars and developed by MIT scientist Rodney Brooks. These intelligent weapons kill those who do not have electronic deterrence devices. As the story progresses, it surfaces that these smart machines have created humanoid-appearing killing devices, and after presumably eliminating two known varieties, the remaining humans learn that another "second variety" has been devised, and the plot turns around which of the "human" characters is really a murderous android, anticipating the themes of Dick's later works.

The same year that these stories appeared, a vast number of cautionary warnings concerning the future were published in the field of SF. Bertrand Wolfe published his novel Limbo (1952) that delineated a frightening post-holocaust high-tech world. Taking Wells' biosurgerical projection The Island of Dr. Moreau to a higher level, Limbo (1952) goes further in depicting the reconstitution of the human, showing individuals weary of war in a cybernetic society agreeing to amputation of their arms and legs -- and sometimes sexual organs. In Wolfe's bizarre tale and cult classic, after a devastating nuclear Third World War, individuals join a pacificist "Immob" movement that rewards individuals for amputating limbs. Using slogans like "No Demobilization without Immobilization," or, "No Pacificism without Passivity," the Immob movement compensates the voluntary amputees (volamps) with social prestige and special benefits, an ironic parody of the Welfare State. Cyberneticists in turn invent protheses which happen to empower the volamps, making them physically superior to humans, and thus an ironic figure of the posthuman. Satirizing the cybernetic project of reconstituting humans and society, Wolfe portrays a society where science and technology redefine and reconstitute the very structure and boundaries of human beings, creating new fusions of humans and technology, and thus a new type of technohumans, as well as technological control systems.

Both Dick and Wolfe linked cybernetics to war and fear of military technology spiraling out of control, creating a nuclear apocalypse, or simply coming to dominate human beings and their society. Obviously, both were aware, through Norbert Wiener and others, of the military origins of cybernetics, of how during World War Two a new science of information theory, and new communications and military technologies, emerged -- including the computer and cybernetics theory and practices (see Edwards 1996 and Hayles 1999).

To properly grasp the many dimensions of Dickís amazing oeuvre, one must read him in the context of the pulp science fiction genre in which his work was initially conceived and written, the socio-historical environment in which he wrote, and the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of his work. On one level, Dick is one of the most comical, outrageous and engaging SF writers of his generation who published his short stories in the major SF journals and almost all of his major novels with SF paperback publishers. While our focus will be intensely philosophical and theoretical, Dickís works are often extremely humorous and wildly inventive, full of whacky characters, intriguing situations, and original and illuminating images and ideas. Our reading of Androids, however, will spotlight Dickís views on commodification, technology, and the fate of the human being and natural environment under the conditions of a global and militarist capitalism.

It is perhaps Dickís 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that provides his most compelling apocalyptic vision, which also exemplifies the prototypically Dickian themes of the implosion between the real and the artificial, humans and technology, and natural reality and simulation in a high-tech world. In the plot of the novel, which is significantly different from the film Blade Runner that is loosely based on it, Rick Deckard, an android bounty hunter, craves above all else to own real animals, instead of his electric artificial ones, suggesting a future in which one animal species after another has disappeared after a nuclear war. Deckard is ordered to exterminate a group of highly advanced android Nexis-6 models who have escaped from the "off-colonies," where they were slaves, in order to prolong their short preprogrammed lives. The bounty hunter increasingly sympathizes and emphasizes with the androids, one of whom, Rachel, he becomes sexually involved with. Consequently, Deckard is ever more troubled by the killing or "retiring" required by his job, as he comes to recognize the android others as akin to human subjects.

Dick frames his story within the political economy of an interplanetary global capitalism, set in a bombscape of human ruination and massive species extinction in 2021, after World War Terminus. The androids were originally produced to help colonize Mars, when capitalist corporations, having devastated their home base, began inhabiting other planets. In a competitive race between two global giants, the Rosen Association and the Grozzi Corporation vie to market the most advanced androids. This war of technology has produced increasingly complex creatures who are seemingly identical with humans, sharing feelings such as love, empathy, desire, and fear of death. In the form of the Nexus-6 model produced by the Rosen corporation, androids also have acquired a high level of self-reflexivity, which leads them to repudiate their slave status. Hence, as Marx saw in an earlier industrial context, capitalists created their own gravediggers by manufacturing increasingly complex workers who eventually acquire the will to rebel. Thus, Dick provides a futuristic embodiment of Marxís vision of a rebellious proletariat, while underscoring the contradictory logic of capital.

As in many of Dick's novels and stories, the text interrogates what is real and poses the question "What is human"? Rejecting the equation of the human being with language and rationality, Dick instead chooses empathy to characterize the human. In the novel, humans are able to enter into empathetic fusion with Mercer, a religious figure who appears when individuals interact with an "empathy box," which creates a quasi-hallucinatory oneness with Mercer and others participating in the experience. A major theme of the story concerns the difficulty in trying to distinguish between what is real and what is a simulation, what is organic and natural, and what is constructed and artificial. The collapse of clear distinctions between the artificial and the real applies to both animals and human beings in Androids: is it a real animal or an electric model, is it a human being or an android? Even the androids do not really know, since they have simulated lives through implanted memories, and at one point Deckard and his partner Phil Resch, another presumably human bounty hunter, begin to doubt whether they too are human or not, as the readers are also left to wonder.

The android bounty hunters administer a test to detect whether an entity is a human or an android, thereby updating the old Turing test to detect artificial from human intelligence. The examination is based, interestingly, on empathy; apparently, human beings are capable of sympathy and compassion, while androids lack this capacity. Yet Dick portrays humans drained of all feeling, while showing androids gaining empathy, thus questioning what is left of humanity in a high-tech world and whether the distinctive features of the human will survive. Likewise, Deckard is attracted to the android Rachel and has sex with her, an episode which can be read allegorically as one way of negotiating new relations with technology in a posthuman world. Indeed, the androids are superior in some ways to humans, they are hyperreal humans, realer-than real, better-than-real, thus providing, Dick implies, greater warriors, lovers, workers, intellects, and the like.

In a subplot, John Isidore, a "special," a "chickenhead," retarded by the nuclear fallout, lives alone in an abandoned apartment; most inhabitants of earth have left for the colonies and only the poorest and most desperate remain on earth. Isidore hears another inhabitant play a television in the apartment, shyly goes down to meet her, bringing her a pat of butter as a present. It is Pris, one of the escaped androids whose leaders, Roy and Irmina Batty, join her the next day, setting up the eventual showdown with Deckard. The plot structure is typical of Dick's novels that introduce one protagonist, usually an ordinary person thrown into an extraordinary situation, followed by introduction of other, often subhuman, or underclass characters, who then encounters extraordinary humans or aliens, who often threaten the human race. The characters then come together in crisis situation and the resolution of the plot unfolds -- a literary structure taken over by William Gibson and other cyberpunk writers, who, rightly, see Dick as their Godfather.

The Deckard-Rachel relation is also present in the film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Deckard is established as the film noir individualist detective (whereas he is married and returns to his wife in the novel). The android bounty hunter is called a "blade runner" in the movie (a term derived from William Burroughs), and Harrison Ford plays the character with world-weary aplomb. In the film, the androids are called "replicants," or "skin jobs", and are described as "more human than human," and indeed they seem to have more fully developed sensibilities and passion for life, as well as strength and cunning, than the human characters.

The stunning visual environment of Blade Runner provides startling images of the postmodern metropolis, drenched in radiation-saturated rain, the debris and refuse of the high-modern industrial city, and the detitrus of a global and multicultural society. The mis-en-scene is populated with several layers of dense imagery. The sky is filled with high-rise apartments, flaming industrial smokestacks, and hovercraft vehicles, surrounded with neon billboards for global corporations and ads for a new life in the out-colonies. Scott's film deploys the postmodern strategy of pastiche, combining the signs of Dick's SF genre with the voice-over narrative of Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, presented in the style of a film noir detective and variations of the stock characters of the urban crime film appear in the film. The replicant Rachel is portrayed as a noir femme fatale who, however, helps Deckard destroy the androids and even leaves with him in a highly ambiguous romance -- a sharp departure from the novel where Deckard returns home to his wife and an uneasy reconciliation.

The representations of technology in Blade Runner are extremely interesting. Unlike conservative technophobic films, there is no privileging of nature and the human over technology, and Deckard states at one point: "Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard." In the film, Deckard comes to sympathize with the replicants and even falls in love with Rachel, while Roy Blatty is presented as the most articulate and philosophical figure in the film, expressing a profound love of life, loyalty toward his fellow replicants, and ultimately saves Deckard with whom he comes to respect and emphasize, even though the bounty hunter is sent to "retire" him.

Blade Runner points to the oppressive core of capitalism which creates technology to exploit human beings and presents figures of rebellion in the form of the replicants who reject their status as pure instruments of labor with limited life spans. The Tyrell corporation explicitly produces replicants as a pliable labor force, including women who are constructed alternately as love-slaves and castrators, pointing to the socially constructed role of women in capitalist patriarchy. Tyrell lives in a high-rise apartment whose neo-Mayan architecture suggests human sacrifice for the entrepreneurial deity and Tyrell is portrayed as a sinister and warped capitalist patriarch.

Most significantly, the film and novel present humans, machines, institutions, and "reality" itself as socially constructed and thus amenable to reconstruction. Unlike conservative narratives which contrast fixed and unchanging humans with reified technology, Dick's novel and Scott's film foreground the constructedness of humans and technology, blur the distinctions, and show both capable of reconstruction for more socially benevolent purposes. The major protagonists -- Deckard and Roy -- ultimately renounce violence and come to empathize with their supposed opposites and enemies.

Proliferating entropy is a major theme of Dickís major works like Androids, which portray the incessant movement from birth to death, adolescence to senescence, order to disorder, and heterogeneity to homogeneity. As the second law of thermodynamics, "entropy" is a natural process; the cosmos, in Dick's terms, inexorably winds down to a state of "kipple." "No one can win against kipple ... except temporarily and maybe in one spot... It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization" (1987: 58).

Entropy is indeed the prototypical condition for Dick's futuristic world: cities are decaying; the natural environment is disappearing; the androids' short life spans are winding down; and the unfortunates stranded on earth are deteriorating in mind and body. Entropy is also evident in the "waning of affect," a symptom of postmodern subjectivity for theorists like J.G. Ballard and Fredric Jameson. In advanced stages of "civilization," individuals are so affectless that they have to rely on mechanical supplementation -- via technologies such as a "mood organ" or Dickís "empathy box" -- in order to feel. Dick portrays an exhausted human species drained of all feeling, and shows androids gaining empathy. He thereby signals a fusion between humans and machines, questions what is left of humanity in a high-tech world, and calls into doubt the long-term survivability of a human species whose members lack positive emotional bonds with one another.

Dickís texts suggest that just as individuals can hasten the entropy of their own bodies, social systems can quicken their own decay and that of the natural world. As an energy-devouring, resource-depleting, waste-producing, nonstop-guzzling megamachine of growth and accumulation, advanced capitalism rapidly accelerates entropic breakdown. While Blade Runner changed and obscured much in Dick's novel, it brilliantly captured the look and feel of a hyperintensive global system of production drowning in its own waste. The incessant downpour of radiation-saturated rain, the fire-belching smokestacks, the filthy refuse of the ultramodern metropolis, the densely overpopulated city streets and highrise apartments, the glowing neon-billboards and criss-crossing traffic of hovercraft vehicles, and the detitrus of a multicultural society where even language breaks down into kippled fragments underscore the presence of a dying, nihilistic, technocapitalism.

Director Ridley Scott adds in Blade Runner the ironic touch of metallic blimps moving ponderously across the nuclear-red skies, broadcasting advertisements for the good life in the out-colonies. The underclass denizens -- mostly Asian and hybrid countercultural -- live in crowded ghettolike conditions on the ground level, while the remaining upper class dwells in luxurious high-rise apartments, reproducing the class-structure portrayed in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). This futuristic city -- which became the prototype for the universe of cyberpunk -- was recognizably Los Angeles, where the film was shot, but it could stand for any global and multicultural city of a postholocaust future, or the aftermath of a collapse of the global economy.

In retrospect, Dick can be read as a dystopic visionary of the postmodern adventure in which science and technology are presented as creating new forms of the human, bringing about a highly ambiguous posthuman condition. He provides a dialectical foil to the optimistic visions of Star Trek, Spielberg, scientists like Sagan, and progress-besotted technocrats. As new media and cyberculture relentlessly alter everyday life, as amazing virtual technologies, genetic engineering, cloning, and undreamed of technological utopias and nightmares become our fate, Philip K. Dick is an essential guide to the more disturbing elements of the postmodern adventure.

Thus, crises contain opportunities for progressive change and fragmentation, while creating exciting openings and empowering possibilities, as well as dispiriting and destructive tendencies. What does the near future hold for humankind? Will we continue to overpopulate the planet, move toward technocracy, develop violent cultures, produce nuclear weapons, exacerbate the already obscene disparities between the rich and poor, advance trends toward global warming, destroy other species, deplete the earth's natural resources, and utterly self-destruct? Will life end apocalyptically through epidemic disease or a nuclear bang, or will there be enough fragments of humanity left to survive for a short time, as in contrasting conditions of drought and flood depicted by Mad Max and Waterworld, before it ends in a pathetic whimper? Will we mutate into cyborgs or bionic beings and live out our lives in spaceships and space stations? Will we make "contact" and be saved by the superior wisdom and technologies of space aliens, or will they devour us as resources for their megamachines? Or will we learn to harmonize our advanced technological society with the natural world and take on responsible roles as stewards of the earth?

The greatest adventure ever faced by the human species is staring us right in the face: can we use our advanced intelligence and technologies toward constructive rather than destructive ends? Can we learn to live together on this planet? Can we diversify and unify? Can we regain respect and reverence for life? The next few generations hold the fate of the evolution of all life on earth in their hands. The window of opportunity is closing, and the postmodern adventure holds more promise, more danger, and more surreality than any previous adventure known to humanity. We must seek possibilities in the present to move toward a better future. The postmodern adventure is just beginning and alternative futures unfold all around us. Western societies inhabit a historically unique terrain between the modern and the postmodern and we need a variety of theoretical and political perspectives to make sense of the momentous changes that are now occurring. In the Third Millennium, the choices agents make will determine whether the adventure of evolution itself will continue in creative ways on this planet, producing ever more biodiversity or collapsing into the sixth and perhaps final extinction crisis in the history of the earth (see Leakey and Lewin 1996).

As science, technology, and capitalism continue to coevolve into an ever denser global network, the ultimate question is whether we can reshape the driving forces of change to harmonize social with natural evolution, such that diversity and complexity grow in both spheres. Or will current developments produce the death of the human, the despoliation of the earth, and even the demise of all complex life? Neither option is preordained, both are possible futures, and this tension and ambiguity itself is a core feature of the postmodern adventure.

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