When I was young I wished for any other time than my own. I dreamt of both the excitement of the opulent Earth and the gleaming utopias of the future. I always hoped for a little more than this.

*

Paris 1851:

My name is Jean Mertre and my Movement started in this year. I was a young man at the time, squandering the hours reserved for commerce on dreaming as the new Napoleon seized the world outside my garret. It began with art and art was the core. My painting, which until then had been rather traditional in its approach (I was forced to earn money by painting the ugly faces of Paris merchants), began to adopt a new and revolutionary aspect. I began to stretch the very nature of paint and then the very canvas. I ceased struggling to encapsulate the actual world, the people of the streets and the salons, and began to focus on the soul. I rejected the paralysing regiment of those who only dreamt of the body.

I revolutionised colour and form as I threw out all the old teachings that I traced back to Alberti and the Old Masters. This work attracted only a few admirers and I could not display my epics in any place but my garret-studio. No salon would countenance work so insane. But I did receive love and praise from other like-minded fellows, and not just painters. Writers, sculptors and architects were soon all knocking at my door for tea and tumultuous aesthetic debates which kept us up through whole cycles of the very moon. Soon there was a caucus. The Movement began, at the fringes, like ink spilt on parchment that will surely bleed across the whole page from an inauspicious beginning at the margin.

I soon began to question also the canvas. The canvas restricted art just as money confined my movements to the city of Paris, just as the borders of nations restricted our vision of the world. I destroyed the canvas. I painted my shapes on anything: conicals made from severed beams; huge cuboid frames; lakes of swimming metal. Together we began to blend our media. The writer, Constanto, scribbled his first great novel, a novel without pages, across one of my sculpture-building paintings. The architect, Monuis, began to construct edifices in the most fantastic colours, in the most peculiar shapes, from the most unusual materials.

We mark the beginning of the Movement from the time in which the Great Palace of the Imagination was constructed on the Champ de Mars. So great had been the public outcry at the Emperor's frantic resistance to such grand ideas that we concocted a revolution on the streets and the old man was removed, banished to a small island empire in the Bay of Biscay. It had began and soon it would spread across Europe and the world. It was a movement of artists. In our culture, the artist was the highest form of society. So powerful and intoxicating were our ideas that artists began to spring up on every street corner. We bought each others works. Every artist was obliged to buy the new blended art forms of his compatriots. And this worked. We all became not only sufficient but also patrons and connoisseurs and our number far exceeded those who could not live up to our high ideals. We abolished philistines; philistines became a peasantry of potato farmers and sheep herders. All the bureaucrats, clergy, merchants, financiers, politicians and generals were set to honest toil in the fields until such time as they could prove the worth of their imaginative faculties. Industry became art. Politics became art. Paris became one huge artist's colony that spread unhindered throughout France and broke its borders like an untrammelled flood; a Napoleonic moment without canons. England, Prussia, Austria, even Russia joined our utopia as the Movement became truly international. Soon the economy of artists civilised all the known parts of the world. Creativity became the true badge of citizenship, from the far-flung colonies of the south seas to the icy pricks of the Scandinavian north.

Now in my final years, writing the history of the Movement for posterity, lost in the curios of my office in the Grand Palace of the Imagination, I know that what we did was great, beyond parallel in the history of what we have become accustomed to calling humanity (or artistry as we propose to call it in the new century). We live in a kind, clever world, where accolade follows the mind's eye and not its paid hands. I am proud to have given this gift of freedom to the world.

*

London 2045:

Her office is a cold white cubicle. I put my respirator on the desk and, as is customary when greeting a civic functionary, salute the photographs of the founders of the New Global Order: Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates.

'Thank you for your punctuality, stakeholder,' she says, her eyes rigidly gripping mine. 'You have been called to this interview because you have been without work for one year and are no longer eligible for social provision. We are here to discuss what options are now available to you.'

*

West Africa 1876:

My name is Jonathan Archer and I was born in the fair city of Bristol. Those were hard times for folk like ourselves. There did not seem to be enough labour or food for us in our own land and so, in accordance with the teachings of Dr. Malthus, we carried our community across the waves. In the spring 1876 we embarked on our great civilising mission.

We found a cape of verdant jungle and rich loam. The natives ran down the beach and embraced us as brothers, though we at first were a little suspicious of their improper dress and pagan ways. With their help we set about to build a city in the jungle.

This city was called Maltharia, after Malthus, and soon it spread and spread, a catherine wheel of prosperity in a savage land. We established plantations and cultivated wheat and barley. We grew luscious fruits and plump new vegetables. Trees we felled for timber and exported back to England. Though in the early years we were often on the very brink of extinction, soon we were a stable and peaceful community. The natives embraced our ways. We gave them prosperity, society, culture and the word of God. They became honorary Englishman; English in every way but the colour of their skins. The colony spread into the interior and soon we had self-government, a council, a system of levying tax, schools, churches, even a university college in Maltharia. Under the protection of the Union Jack and the ever nourishing sun we built a little utopia in the Tropics.

We were not alone. Similar ships left Europe throughout those middle years of the nineteenth century and brought harmony to the farthest outposts of the world. We united the godless with our zealous virtue and bounteous commerce. Africa and Asia were transformed and linked into our imperial web. We sold our wares to our European friends and in return they traded the most magnificent new materials, textiles and cloth, tools and machines, engines and steamboats. Through this work we abolished war, for everyone needed peace to trade. We abolished the old ways of the tribe and the totem, all the animal gods, and replaced them with the true way. Such a mingling of the races, such co-operation, created a new confident sense. We became united by a common love of freedom and the one world, which though we cultivated we did so in accordance with its laws and never despoiled.

Maltharia is now a grand metropolis, as beautiful as Paris or Rome. To think that as we first plunged from our boats and staggered up this shore it was little more that a clump of trees on a rugged plateau. I watch the sun set over its spires and turrets, the sound of cricket balls mixing with the evening songbirds. We live in a world that is truly paradise.

*

London 2045:

She asks questions. I cannot lie. Every employee of the Department of Social Security has a polygraph chip inserted behind their left eye which monitors an interviewee's heartbeat. She conducts the conversation as if reading a script. She must follow this routine with dozens or hundreds of clients a week. But when this script is abandoned she becomes flustered.

'The Institute of Chartered Accountants report says you left your employment there on your own volition,' she says.

'That's true.'

'Why?'

'Because I didn't enjoy the work. It gave me very little. I didn't want to do it. The university career service sent me there against my wishes.'

'So why did you leave?

'Because I didn't like it.'

'That answer is not one we accept. Why did you leave?'

'For the reasons I've just explained.'

She raises a slow eyebrow and moves the cursor on her screen to a box labelled 'refused to answer'.

*

Moscow 1937:

I am Vladimir Svidov, Commissar for Integration. I am enjoying a cigar and a brandy in my office. The celebratory dinner has been long and boisterous but it is not every day in one's life that one celebrates the end of a great campaign. The Soviet Union has again been victorious, conquering Britain and Ireland in two weeks. For propaganda purposes we project the Red Army as the heroes but we know we have to thank our comrades, the working class, who gallantly fought side by side with our troops to overthrow their anachronistic monarchy with its coronations and colonies. Of course, Britain had been militarily week since our triumph in the India Campaign of 1931. That was the last time Lenin witnessed a victory parade in Moscow. But since his death Comrade Bukharin has continued our great work. The working class is soon to be master of the world. We have driven capitalism from Europe and Asia. America, Japan and Australia are the only enemies of justice who have not embraced us.

Such heady days, almost too much for one life. When I joined the Party in 1917 I had no idea we would bring such great happiness to the world. Even I had doubts, during the civil war and the NEP, but now we have truly solved the supply problems of agriculture and industry. We have created universal equality, from Canton to Cork, from Murmansk to Madras. Nobody is hungry anymore. We have more than enough food. And everyone has work and purpose. Everyone works for each other. We have abolished exploitation as well as property. Everyone has the same opportunities for education and training. Everyone can join the Party and help us spread communism throughout the world, bringing hope and happiness to the suffering millions. We are witnessing a true withering away of the state.

Our wars have been short and righteous, always an intervention on behalf of our brother workers. This started in the border states and then onto Germany in the twenties. We invaded at the request of the revolutionaries and strikers. It was bloody but brief. When the French counter-attacked the following year we swept through Paris in days, ousting the government, marching south and amalgamating the Communist government of Spain into the Union. Other countries, Italy, Portugal, Belgium followed by choice. Only Britain held out, resisting with a reactionary stubbornness, but now we have driven the capitalists into the sea. Their king now dines in Toronto, their Mr. Churchill an exile in New York.

I can hear the midnight factories rumbling from my window. I finish my drink. It's a fine bottle, a gift from the workers of the Berlin Soviet. There are documents to study, papers to authorise, resources to assign. I must leave for London soon. There is work to be done. There is still a world to win.

*

London 2045:

'You have rejected a call to military service,' she says.

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because I am a conscientious objector.'

'But the Water Wars are a matter of great social importance. Don't you think Europe has a right to resources?'

'Not when they belong to someone else,' I say. She frowns and taps her keyboard.

'I am afraid that I have no option but to classify you as Socially Redundant sir. You are neither willing to carry out your social duty as a stakeholder in the European Union or your duty to the market as a consumer. There is little more I can do for you but recommend you join the Programme.'

I don't flinch. I had been prepared.

*

London 1979:

My name is David Foulkes, cabinet minister. Our party came to power in this year. It was a new party albeit with an old name. Our perception, some would say our duty, was as a party that upheld traditional values of social order and the work ethic. In this year we changed. We determined to create a meritocracy...




[to read the end of this story, buy em two.]

Ashley Stokes

Ashley Stokes as born in 1970. He is the author of one novel, The Perfect Gesture, an extract of which was published in Defying Gravity 3. He is at present writing a second novel, Persephone’s curse.

Something Called The Modern World continues an exploration of Utopia and Distopia apparent in earlier stories. It was also inspired by Kafkaesque DSS interviews with people dehumanised by assertiveness training seminars, and also the idea that the new technologies are robbing the world of its mystery and anything ‘virtual’ is ‘fake’.