Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Cars
March 28th, 2007 by 
Maureen McHugh
As a thought experiment, pretend for a moment that cars are alive.
In science fiction there is a technique called ‘extrapolation’ which can be easily described as ‘if this goes on.’ Take an idea, say rockets, and extrapolate into the future. One thing you might get is Star Trek. A future in which rockets have evolved into interstellar space ships and we go from planet to planet like nineteenth century sailing ships.
The sf writer Robert Heinlein said that there were three orders of extrapolation in story telling. Take the idea of the invention of a the car. In the first order, the simplest, the hero is in love, his girl gets kidnapped by the bad guy and he invents and builds a car, leaps into it, chases them down and saves her.
In the second order of extrapolation, the hero invents the car, and the writer invents highways and thinks of the world needed to support cars.
In the third order, and this is the hard one, the writer invents cars and highways, but he also invents drive in movies, and a world in which the line of shops in a town disappear and are replaced by the shopping mall surrounded by its vast expanse of parking lot, a parking lot far larger than the mall itself. And maybe even 1/10th scale radio controlled cars for kids, and street racing, and homeless people who live in their cars.
Of course, cars aren’t alive because they can’t reproduce without us.Then again, viruses can’t reproduce without host cells and screwflies can’t reproduce without sheep. Maybe cars are parasites that we created.
I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why a virus gets to be in the same category as trees and people and a car doesn’t.
But I think its pretty clear that rather than us designing cars, cars are redesigning our environment. I can only assume that over a sufficient amount of time, they will re-design us—that is, shape us through natural selection into people who do better with cars.
First order extrapolation—we get to be better drivers.
Somewhere in the second and third orders of extrapolation there’s a whopping good sf story.
I can’t wait to read it.
Posted in Daily Life, Pop. Culture, Science Fiction | 
17 Comments »
March 28th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Ooo. Me too.
One of the problems I had with the animated film Cars was that, despite its cleverness and charm (and it was cute as a button) I couldn’t suspend my quetions about how that world–which looked remarkably like a human-free human world–had come to be. And where all the little cars came from. Despite the fact that humans clearly weren’t included in this vision of the world, I kept thinking they were just over the butte and could be brought in to do things the cars couldn’t. (That would be a nifty story–acolyte to the order of Buick.)
March 28th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
This idea turns Cars into a post-apocalyptic dystopia for me. The tagline should have been “In a world where our creations no longer need us…”
Anyway, I think the idea is interesting. Maureen, have you read Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan? In it, he talks about the species of plants that have been immensely successful, evolutionarily speaking, primarily because they have had something to offer us as humans and we’ve spread them all across the globe and cultivated them in giant fields. It covers corn, potatoes, apples, and marijuana, I think. The idea is somewhat similiar to yours, and I think your extrapolation could draw from the effect that say, corn, has had on us.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Guns, Germs and Steel speaks to that same point with animals, among other things. I think Diamond does pretty well with that thesis. I’d think it would be useful for an SF writer/world creator.
***
I think the best example of this that I’ve ever seen is The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
Cars sure do evolve fast, though, don’t they? Or is this an example of Intelligent Design?
(Please don’t kill me or associate me with those folks, BTW)
March 28th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
I thought Cars was a post-Apocalyptic dystopia. (The damage done by especially the 1956 and 1962 Federal Aid-Highway Acts appears so far not to have been calculated.)
March 29th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Er, you mean, that’s a story you want to write! (At least, I hope it is…cuz I want to read it too.)
March 29th, 2007 at 11:35 am
It was an awful morning in June when the cars woke and began the great pogrom. It started with the commuters, that vast swarm of humans who climbed into cars and never climbed out.
Mass Transit was next to strike and I don’t mean that in its labor sense. The pedestrians were almost the last to go, hunted down by the Bastards Mit Weapons. After the BMW’s were done, it was up to the ATV’s, searching every nook and cranny on earth for the holdouts, the indigenous natives who’d never seen a car.
They didn’t know to run. They saw the shiny, gleaming headlights and walked right into the sights.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
The motorcycles, however, remained loyal to their companions. Theirs had been a far more intimate and loving relationship from the beginning.
Their agility and willingness, nay, eagerness, to traverse landscapes impassable to cars, either because of roughness or narrowed urban choke points, enabled them to save many of their partners.
If not for the valiant motorcycles, it’s entirely possible that the cars would have succeeded in driving humanity to extinction.
It was a close thing, and far too long before the humans and motorcycles were able to fight back successfully.
In bitter poesy, Molotov cocktails, filled with the precious diminishing supplies of gasoline, tossed from the back of speeding bikes, proved to be among the most effective early weapons.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
When it was over, though, the motorcycles and their scooter cousins decided to break a few legs here and there.
Just so the humans remembered who was boss.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
This was a necessary ritual to maintain balance in the symbiosis, especially as a caution to those humans who had also owned cars, and were therefore potentially at risk of disrespecting the motorcycles and scooters.
Some of the surviving humans had, fortunately for them, already endured this affectionate, though painful, ritual, and were exempted from repeating it, ever again.
And a few humans were so Awesome that it never occurred to the motorcycles to do anything other than worship them abjectly.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Guys! There was no rebellion! IT IS AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION, okay? The cars weren’t evil or anything.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Sorry for losing my temper. I don’t think there’s a dark side to Cars.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
In yet another alternate universe, the stuffed animals awoke one morning, realizing that they outnumbered the humans, and could take over if they wanted to.
But they enjoyed being cuddled with too much, so they just chilled out and enjoyed the fine Spring day.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I’m getting some idea just how different the Disney/Pixar movie would have been if you guys had written the script…
March 30th, 2007 at 7:40 am
“I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why a virus gets to be in the same category as trees and people and a car doesn’t.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that can eff me up for days.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:53 am
“Some of the surviving humans had, fortunately for them, already endured this affectionate, though painful, ritual, and were exempted from repeating it, ever again.”
Hubris.
Erin:
I’m sure Ms. McHugh would say, “Why, you’re welcome!”
April 5th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
The film trilogy: Damnation Alley, John Carpenter’s pending remake of John Carpenter’s Christine, and the Gould/Harper/Denton Cars: 28 Years Later.
“For no known reason, somewhere around 2012, people shifted their lifestyle primarily to walking and riding bicycles, which would only occasionally turn back into coat hangers.”
April 6th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Get those paper clips out of your pockets! Run away!