Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer. The novel starts as a straight-up realistic account of a woman named Jean Serjeant born in the 1920’s, conventional parents, an eccentric Uncle Leslie of whom she is very fond, a flyer named Tommy Prosser who is grounded and billeted at the Serjeant house during the war, a stale marriage to a policeman named Michael, a timid son named Gregory. As the novel progresses, it promises a poignant reflection on life, mortality and the miracle of the ordinary … until we reach the final section and discover that Jean is now a hundred years old, which means that the novel’s present is sometime after 2020. From a 1987 point of view, the world enjoys as yet undreamt-of developments, including something that sounds a lot like Google.
Here is what Julian Barnes writes about the General Purposes Computer (GPC), a project begun in 1998 and released for public consumption in 2003:
The General Purposes Computer was begun in 1998 after a series of government inquiries. Previously, in the late eighties, there had been various pilot scheme which had sought to put the whole of human knowledge onto an easily accessible record. The Funlearn Project of 1991-92, with officially sponsored prizes and scholarships, had been the best known of these schemes; but its purity of principle had been impugned when it was linked to a government campaign to decrease the child-user percentage in state videogame parlours. Some had even accused Funlearn of didacticism.
Inevitably the early schemes had been book-oriented; they were attempts to create the ultimate, perfect library where “readers” (as they were still archaically known) could obtain access to the world’s accumulation of knowledge.
Although Barnes envisions this knowledge archive as a government initiative instead of a private endeavor, he captures something of Google’s aspirations, including a debate which he frames as a dispute between proponents of “Total Knowledge” and “Correct Knowledge”. It presages a concept that Jeron Lanier identifies in You Are Not a Gadget as “cybernetic totalism”, an ideological stance adopted by Google and many technologists: machine intelligence will arise as a natural consequence of an accumulation of knowledge.
In Staring at the Sun, Gregory pays frequent visits to the GPC and consults it almost in the same way Athenians used to consult the Oracle of Delphi. But the process proves frustrating:
Gregory didn’t want examples. That was one of the troubles with GPC: it was so full of information it always tried to give you as much of it as possible; like some party bore, it wanted to drag you away from your own interests and boast of its knowledge instead.
That sounds like Amazon with its useless book recommendations, or the 200,000 different links returned by a Google search. And Google promises to become an even bigger “party bore” now that it will be incorporating “information” from Google+ in its Search Plus Your World. What I find most curious about reading these passages is that Barnes reflects upon these developments with a note of irony while we, who now live it, have, for the most part, lost our ironic detachment. It is what it is and we accept it in all its absurdity.