Maasai who cultivate the barren soil with their herds between habitable wind turbines, tiny robots who have made themselves independent in the area of the former Ebersberg Forest, a city that only consists of highways and parking garages or one that looks more like a forest. These are just a few of the visions that you can recently read about in the “Library of the Future”, a collection of short stories that tell of the coming Ebersberg.
These works were created last year as part of the art and culture project “Creating the future together”. Since spring, interested parties have met online, especially, and thought about where the world in general and the district town in particular will develop. The result is 29 stories of different lengths, which can now be read in the online library and are set in different times. It ranges from five to 100 years into the future, with most of them setting their stories in the middle of the current century. The settings of the stories are just as different as the leaps in time that one can make while reading.
Some are told like diary entries – which, of course, could not be written for many years. Others are reports of events that might one day occur. Not all of them are futuristic, not even at second glance; some could also take place in the here and now. Some others, on the other hand, are quite escapist, with ingredients that you would expect from science fiction. Be it teleporters and flying local transport, invasive computers that degrade their creators to pets, or the complete opposite: a return to values and ways of life that are already considered out of date today.
Not everything will work out in the future either
Some scenarios resemble the present, perhaps enhanced by a futuristic backdrop. Which is one of the classic sci-fi topoi: Technology may advance, but the way people act doesn’t necessarily. Others choose the opposite approach, which has been popular since Huxley at least, and design a completely alien social order with its own rules and norms. What all stories have in common is the message that Mel Brooks expressed in the film Spaceballs with the beautiful sentence: “Even in the future nothing works.” Because the future may be better in some ways, but by no means the end of all problems – sometimes it is even more problematic than the present. And even in the less dystopian stories, their protagonists at least have to face challenges of future everyday life.
The air taxi also occurs, of course.
(Photo: Christoph Schmidt / dpa)
Which of course has to do with the laws of dramaturgy on the one hand: Only Ponyhof is boring, no matter when. On the other hand, the portrayal of a not quite perfect world of the future was also explicitly the aim of the project: “Current actions can be oriented and assessed based on values, wishes and fears,” says the opening credits of the future library. The project was initiated by Kerstin Gollner and Ebersberg’s Third Mayor Lakhena Leng, precisely for the reason that today’s fiction will become tomorrow’s activity. Ideally, this then results in approaches to solving current problems.
Whether this succeeds will be shown in the new year, when the project “Building the future together” goes into the next round. It already has at least one success to show for it: a small library of entertaining short stories of tomorrow that fits well into the time of looking back and looking around the turn of the year.
The stories are under https://bibliothekderzukuenfte.de, more information about the project behind it is under www.gemeinsam-zukunft-machen.de to find.