Manifesto for the Atomic Age/An Introduction

The present belongs in part only to those of us who happen to be here; the rest of it belongs to those who will be coming after. This we may know dimly. Out of lumps and bits of nothing, out of things that seem to have presently no rational meaning, the future is building its new tower of blocks; and a way of seeing this further business transacting itself now is perhaps all there is to the gift of prophecy.

Dr. Jordan possesses that rare and disturbing faculty. As he imparts here what he sees, no circular panorama appears, lighted in technicolor by the flares of revelation; what he does is to create, by a kind of mental radar, a gray field of vision where "the weird is coming true already," and there, as upon a screen, the imagination may watch the solitary grand mechanic at the work of preparing the shapes and forms ​and the appropriate illusions for the next strange-clad order of artificial reality.

It was not easy to write. Among other difficulties is the one of language. Things that may not yet be externally perceived want both name and symbol, and so it is that if we attempt to describe them we either distort the meaning of familiar words or lose it entirely. How long did it take to find an everyman's language for the age, now passing, that began with the Industrial Revolution—the age that revolved on what Dr. Jordan calls the coal-iron-gold axis, within a frame of machine power, money wages, money profit, credit, savings and investment, and such institutions as private property, private enterprise, and free foreign trade? What Dr. Jordan undertakes, therefore, is to draw only the frame of the future, and not anything precisely that may rise in it. Indeed, it is possible that the future itself could do no more, for in this oncoming age of automatous creatures that see and feel and think and move with the speed of sound, with matter and energy interchangeable ​at the whim of man, all externality no doubt will be fickle and fluid and experimental to a degree not hitherto imaginable. No precise thing will be inevitable. Nor, for that matter, was this future inevitable.

Whether man really has anything to do with it or not, it must be true that any future will exist in the room of every other kind of future that might have been. How then is it possible, by a way of seeing in the present, to foretell even so much as what its frame will be? That may be done, as Dr. Jordan does it, by thoughtfully regarding the materials that are selected, this selection taking place every day before our eyes, just as you may know that when a builder assembles bricks there will be a brick house. Besides selection there is rejection, too. The political cornerstone of the dissolving age was freedom. This builder we are watching rejects that precious material in a contemptuous manner; in place of it he demands the social plastic of individual surrender. Thus you may guess that the house he is building, no matter what shape it ​may assume, will be an uncomfortable place for the individual, if luckily it turns out to be not, in fact, a prison.

What of the past? Does not the present contain the past and must not the future contain them both? No axiom has been more believed than this, that to know the past was to know the future, and always until now it was true. In the age of molecular magic we could believe it still. A time came, as if it were yesterday, when anything molecule man imagined, this he could do, so that for the first time in his life his fantasy was inferior to his works, and less thrilling. Still, he was somehow related to his own past and bound by it. Atom man gave birth to himself. He has no ancestor. Suddenly, with the atomic bomb in his hands, he steps off into space. So now a world that has no past, nor any axis upon which to revolve until a new one may be found, moves meanwhile through time by the gay rocket principle.