On rediscovering a prophetic genius

Billionaires escaping the world they’ve helped to destroy by hot-footing it into outer space? Mark Engineer recalls a time thirty-six years ago when such a prospect was still a piece of fiction…

Every once in a while a writer creates a work which feels so prescient in later times that they’re hailed as not just a genius but a prophet. Think of Frankenstein and how the themes it explores are still so relevant to the worlds of AI and genetics. Or 1984, and how the phrase ‘alternative facts’ deployed so usefully by the US Republican Party could come straight from O’Brien and the Thought Police’s playbook. Or Zamaytin’s We – its chilling depiction of a state ordered entirely by reason and mathematics, and the parallels with our algorithm-driven society.

To this list of visionaries, this gathering of literary titans, I now propose we add…Ben Elton.

Stay with me here. I’m not talking about The Young Ones or Blackadder, brilliant as they are. I’m definitely not talking about The Thin Blue Line or Upstart Crow (though I admit the latter is a guilty pleasure.) I’m talking about his novels. Specifically, his debut novel, Stark, which I read shortly after its release, and re-read recently.  

Stark was published in 1989 and was set in an unspecified time – possibly the near future, possibly the late 80s dialled up a couple of notches. A bunch of billionaires become aware that the Earth is dying. Instead of changing their ecocidal ways, they hatch a dastardly plan to escape.

Elton was brave for tackling the theme at the time he did. Nowadays, it feels like every novel has to at least obliquely refer to the climate and ecological emergency. But back then, very few writers wanted to touch it. Perhaps because it was too big and complex. But more likely because people weren’t really that interested. It still felt like something we really should do something about at some point, rather than something that was actually happening – although of course it was, even then.

Stark sold over a million copies. But posterity hasn’t, so far, been kind to it. That’s possibly because it’s not actually very good. Elton’s comedic skills are prodigious, but he’s not a great novelist. Sure, there are some amusing characters. Some good jokes. There are also some terrible jokes, and some jokes that really haven’t stood the test of time. So why am I proposing this not-great book as a visionary work?

It’s because of the plot. The evil industrialists build a bunch of rockets and take off into space to set up a colony, leaving the rest of mankind to its fate. When I first read this, I remember scoffing at how ridiculous it seemed. I mean, come on, Ben. How silly. Right? As if they’d get away with that!

And now? Now I have two words for you. Elon Musk.

There’s one very real difference between what happens in the novel and what’s happening now. The sinister cabal does what it does deep in the Australian desert, in absolute secret. Because they assume the people would never stand for it. We’d stop it happening. We’d rise up and tear them to pieces. This probably seemed a perfectly reasonable assumption at the time. And now? Now, Musk and Bezos and that lot are talking openly about planning to escape into outer space. And we the people? Well, we’re just letting them get on with it. We’re shrugging our shoulders, and buying more of their stuff, and allowing them to continue to destroy our home while becoming even more obscenely rich. Elton’s plot didn’t go too far. It didn’t go far enough.

Stark doesn’t end well. Almost all of humanity, left on “the giant toilet and rubbish dump we have made out of Paradise” squares its shoulders and tries to face up to a certain and horrible future. And the brave new world of the plutocrats fails entirely. Because they hate each other too much to ever work together. They may have escaped the Earth, but they can’t escape “the poison in their own souls.”

I do enjoy the idea of Elon, Zuck and J-Bez drinking recycled urine and tearing lumps out of one another in some Godforsaken corner of Mars. But for the sake of the rest of us, I really hope that Ben turns out to be wrong on this one.