Science Fiction, the Future, and Technological Apathy: Futurama Reaction Paper

2013-14710

BACONGUIS, Liana Isabelle T.

STS-THY GROUP 7

Futurama Reaction Paper

Science Fiction, the Future, and Technological Apathy 

Futurama is many things – comedy, science-fiction, occasionally drama – but at the very center of it all is pizza delivery boy Fry, who finds himself cryogenically frozen on December 31, 1999 and wakes up one thousand years later, later encountering a cast of fantastic characters. The future he finds is much like ours, except with aliens and fantastical inventions they consider mundane: efficient public transport through tubes, easily accessible spaceships, and talking, walking robots that are considered run-of-the-mill when today they are technological marvels.

Fry, in a sense, experiences time travel in that he finds himself in one time and wakes up to find himself in another. But it’s not true time travel as Fry traveled through the millennial difference like we would – linearly – except in his case he was just cryogenically frozen and unable to feel much of it. But he does experience what could be called the fish-out-of-water experience: he is a time traveler in the sense that his mindset from the past has to take in the newer, much more advanced future. And he embraces this future, because he has nothing left for him in 1999.

Fry is our audience surrogate. His loser, underachiever personality is supposed to be something we can project on, and so we see the futuristic world from his eyes and relate to how he feels about things. We share his amazement at all the technological wonders. Scientifically speaking, the show is telling us we have nowhere to go but up at this point – civilization will further flourish with the help of technology.

Yet at the same time, we share Fry’s disgust at the futuristic society’s blatant disregard for the potential of human life – peoples’ “roles” in society are assigned to them and they have no choice but to accept them; suicide is apparently common enough that whoever’s running the place keeps suicide booths on the streets and makes no attempt to try and save these people. Robots that could be human (because they are sentient and feel) are tossed aside simply because they aren’t needed anymore. It seems that having so much science and technology on their hands has made their people apathetic and uncaring.

Futurama is an amazing show that, while primarily comedy at Fry and Bender’s expense, has managed to bring an undercurrent of social commentary to it. While amazing, their future is not an ideal place to live in, and it is our responsibility as future scientists to make sure our future will be.