In order to facilitate the immersion, a number of conventions are established. In general, the narrative concerns events that are said to have already happened. There is no exit door for this fictional world, and its beginnings already exist in our current society. It is one of our futures, presented as already having happened, as already past. “Everything, paradoxically, is shown as if it is already too late,” Claisse observes. “And that is when awareness can grasp something, and clues to getting out of the predicament may appear.” The rhetoric of menace and alert are omnipresent.

In addition, all these narratives are at work making themselves obsolescent. They present a future scenario in the hopes it will be never actually take place. They are created in order not to come true, in order to be considered and avoided. They offer the reader a purchase on the world, an element of knowledge that allows them to observe it from a different angle, and to act. These narratives do not have all the canonical features supposed to belong to the novel of anticipation. Some create realistic effects for themselves that go as far as public pretense, by the means of channels of communication and information that are usually authoritative and dependable. An example known to many Belgians is the program Bye Bye Belgium, a phony documentary aired by the RTBF on December 13, 2006, which announced that Flanders had just voted to approve its own unilateral declaration of independence from Belgium.

"Bye Bye Belgium is a paradigmatic example of this ‘future as past,’” says Claisse, marvelling. “And from an individual point of view, many Belgian citizens reacted strongly to the false documentary. I don’t think it would have had such an effect if it had not been set up to pretend to be real.” Through realistic effects, Belgian viewers were effectively inserted into a false narrative history. The effectiveness of the immersion was due to the simulation of reality. Arming itself with simulated reality, irony passes by way of pretense, in order to gain the support of the viewer, who realizes in retrospect what was expected of him.

Uchronic precedent

In his examples of the ‘future anterior’ Claisse sees a sort of contrast between George Orwell and Simson Garfinkel. In 1949, George Orwell published 1984. His famous piece of anticipative fiction featured a protagonist, Winston Smith, who tried to stand up to the totalitarian society in which he found himself, a centralised society, in which no one escaped the control of Big Brother. In 2000, Simson Garfinkel published Database Nation, in which he investigates all kinds of threats against personal privacy represented by new technologies. There is no more totalitarian, all-seeing power, but rather a whole group of intrusive, data-gathering corporations who qualify as “kid Brothers”. Claisse shows how Garfinkel discards the importance of Orwell, who is treated as a mere anti-Communist. Whereas Orwell saw the State as absolute evil, today governments in Garfinkel’s view could be decisive parts of a solution to the excesses of private multinational corporations. Today, the form in which ‘control’ threatens us is more “discreet and pervasive”. But still, each one of us is supposed to be participating each day in his or her own enslavement, subjecting himself or herself to ‘control’ by using new technologies.