Darko Macan, a famous Croatian comic author, offered answers to some of the questions of how today looks from tomorrow's point of view in the book Tomorrow. 21 stories for the 21st century which he recently published "Creative Center".
The book is intended for teenagers, readers who have countless doubts about the time in which they live. The answers offered to them by Darko Macan are in the form of vividly told stories of their peers from the future. They are clear, often advice, and often more natural. Srđa Dragović illustrated them.
"I'm playing"
Darko Macan tells "Vreme" that he does not criticize everyday life with stories from the 21st century, but rather plays with its phenomena and asks:
"Do you remember more the game, friends, events and emotions or the material from your school days? The truth is relative anyway, the only thing that is unquestionable is the way we experience it."
Today's adults fear how their teenagers will cope with AI, avatars and similar technological temptations of the future, while the characters in Darko Macan's stories are fine with it. That's why Sutra it also acts as a message to adults that they should not be afraid of such changes.
"I don't know if I have the right to tell anyone, but I'm pretty sure that none of the decisions I've made in my life out of fear have been good. Equally, anyone who uses fear to get us to do something - the fear of whether or not we accept AI - does not wish us well. Since we're talking about science fiction, I would like to quote a very dear quote from Herbert Dine, 'Fear is the killer of the mind'. I hope the reverse is also true," says Darko Macan.
Although it is quite certain that AI will be a common phenomenon as soon as tomorrow, nevertheless, the people who are now creating education in Serbia are trying with all their might to expel it from schools.
"Politicians are just weather vanes"
"Douglas Adams, a famous SF author, once said that we accept everything we see as children as if it had always been there, what we encounter in puberty we experience as exciting and something we would like to do, and when we grow up we start to shy away from everything and grumble at everything. In which direction the young and AI will go, they will decide, without us. And politicians are nothing but wind vanes anyway".
Illustration 1From the book "Tomorrow", illustration by Srđa Dragović
In one of the stories from Sutra students run away from classes. Does this mean that school plans and programs in the future will be as boring as they are now?
Macan reminds that "ever since school, there have been stories about children who don't like it. It's not necessarily a condemnation of schooling and pedagogy, but the essence of storytelling: what kind of story can be told about children who love school? Or about adults who love their jobs, neighbors who are on good terms, people who don't object to politicians. There can be reports like that, but no story is without conflict."
He adds: "Personally, I've always loved going to school, but of course I found the stories about the kids who didn't to be more interesting."
Further, also in one of the stories, Hana became what probably all her peers (and not only them) would like - the ideal girl from the advertisement. However, something happened to her that she did not expect.
Darko Macan says that "one can learn that two plus two is as much as they tell us it is, but only when we feel on our own skin how much our salary is insufficient to cover the loans, do we understand the harsh reality of mathematics. Geography is understood at the border, history when for the first time someone looks at you as a member of the nation, and not the individual you believed you were. The story of Hana is the story of dreams that are broken when they come true, and that, I think, is universal. It's only worse when you don't achieve".
"It's tricky to be in the news"
Although we know that tomorrow depends on today, the tomorrow that Macan "predicts" is not dangerous, it does not contain the horrors that today's youth see on television every day. He agrees that "we breathe war like oxygen" and reminds that "we think about both equally: about oxygen only when we run out of it, and about war only when it gets too close to us. But, again, as with material: it's easy to watch war on a cell phone, much more difficult to find yourself in the news."
And therefore, "it makes no sense to prophesy war to children, just pray that it passes them by."
Today's times have already moved teenagers in Serbia to some future, more mature years. They are aware of the reality, they care about it being better, and that's why they are working to change it. What kind of literature would suit such a generation?
"The one they will write themselves," says Darko Macan. "Anyone who, in one way or another, is forced to grow up loses the need for literature that will interpret the world for him, so he replaces it with literature with which he wants to interpret himself to the world."
"I can't wait to see what kind of new world their pens imagine, even if they probably wrote me off."
He says that he teaches comics two days a week at a private university.
"And, if I have understood anything, it is that the current situation, in Croatia and beyond, does not offer young people (and not even old people) any coherent vision of the future. Every political option offers a way out only in a better past, one way or another, and the past does not interest young people. They are interested in what awaits them, they are interested in what they will have to deal with, what they can hope for, they are interested in tomorrow," said Darko Macan, author of 21 stories from the 21st century collected in the book Sutra.
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