“Gravid with the ancient future”: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History

We ourselves shall be loved and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

(Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

I

One of the striking generic features of the emerging field of Big History is a closing glance toward the future. Summed up by the title of Fred Speir’s Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), this generic gesture shows up in the “Big History Project,” a free online course for secondary schools, whose final unit is entitled “The Future” and features Henry Louis Gates and Bill Gates offering their prognostications on the future of the earth over the next 50 years (Big).¹ The concluding chapter of Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain, entitled “Looking Ahead,” offers this final admonition: “The deep past is also our present and our future” (202).² The convention of turning back to the future can be explained, in part, by the environmentalist origins of the field. Big History grows out of the green politics of US sixties counter-culture, which first finds its expression in projects like the Whole Earth Catolog and Earth Day. The scale of Big History promises to bring into stark relief the environmental impact of our species on the planet. In a cautionary note echoed by many contributors to the discourse, Cynthia Stokes Brown opens Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (2012) by sounding on the negative ecological consequences of human activity: “the actions people have taken to keep their offspring increasing have put the planetary environment and its life-forms in grave jeopardy” (xii).

As its title “What Now? What Next?” implies, the conclusion of Brown’s study pushes the book’s historical narrative beyond the title’s nominal temporal limits (from the big bang to the present) out into the future. Offering the computer modeling of Meadows, Randers, and Meadows’ The Limits to Growth (1972) as an appropriate scientific resource for playing out possible “short-term scenarios” for humanity’s future, Brown maintains that the best place to explore our “middle-range future” is in works of science fiction like George Stuart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Kim S. Robertson’s trilogy Red Mars (1991), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996). It is fitting that a foundational text of the discourse of Big History should end in the realm of science fiction. After all, as Stanislaw Lem suggests, science fiction, like Big History, considers humans under the aspect of species-being (12).³ Indeed, Lem’s prescription for science fiction could just as well apply to Big History: “to survey the whole human species in an extreme situation” (13). This impererative could also describe the brief of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004).

If Cloud Atlas repeatedly signals its affiliations with such science fiction standards as Ray Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451 (1953) and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), the novel’s interest in Big History, specifically Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)—wittily bowdlerized in the novel as “disease, dust, and firearms” (490)—is equally apparent. And it is the presence of Big History in Cloud Atlas that will be the focus of this essay. We will read Mitchell’s novel as a kind of thought experiment that asks what would it be like to inhabit worlds that appear determined by the kind of neo-Darwinism found in Diamond’s deep history. Mitchell’s novel turns on a central agon between deep evolutionary imperatives that seem to shape the fate of characters within the novel’s many fictional worlds and certain countervailing possibilities that suggest that the human and post-human actors in these worlds might transhistorically determine the fate of our species and our planet. In...