Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Cool taxonomy, but are there really only four types? Let's try with some examples.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut - imagines a future where mechanical automation and IQ-optimized hiring leads to mass unemployment, but extensive welfare systems keeps the mediocre masses well-fed, just demoralized and without dignity. Combination of Huxleyan with Kafkaesque?

The Handmaid's Tale - Orwellian with a pronounced patriarchal-religious emphasis

Anthem by Ayn Rand - generic Orwellian with a primitivist/preindustrial Luddite version of Phildickian.

(Actually, we run into a convergence there. Isn't Orwellian thought control simply the overt forcible version of Phildickian thought control, the latter is more indirect, subtle, and possibly not even enforced by the state but private actors and individuals? Both involve rewriting your mind to reject liberty.)

Fahrenheit 451 - similar Phildickian rewriting of reality through both Orwellian (the firemen, the unspecified war in the background) and Huxleyan (parlor walls, overload of useless factoids) means.

Atlas Shrugged - world/U.S. in the beginning is not totalitarian, but a generic degenerate socialist bureaucratic state in decline. Whether or not Galt's Gulch is totalitarian, and what type it is, can be left as an exercise to the reader.

Neuromancer, Snow Crash, other classic cyberpunk works- not totalitarian, but heavy on the Huxleyan decadent consumerist society coupled with Phildickian distortion of reality themes.

Brazil by Terry Gilliam - perfectly Kafkaesque.

Would appreciate classification of some other classic dystopian totalitarian works, such as We by Zamyatin or even Animal Farm. Do any of them express totalitarianism in a way that breaks the four-type classification system?

The most obviously missed type would appear to be dystopians characterised by extreme disparities between rich and poor, where the dystopic regime is generally so much better off than the underclass it doesn't need to bother with enforcing or influencing worldviews beyond basic security measures (much of cyberpunk, for example). Call it oligarchic dystopia; I'm not sure which author I'd give the credit to. Arguably there should be [post]apocalyptic dystopia in which the system of organization is the least of people's troubles, of which Anthem and whole subgenres of other books about a future humanity regressing to earlier technological and social states should belong.

Don't think there's too much danger of We breaking the OP's classification system though: it was more or less the template for 1984 (Orwell did read it, and with hindsight his lukewarm review seems rather uncharitable) and as such is one of the earliest and purest examples of Orwellian dystopia.

> The most obviously missed type would appear to be dystopians characterised by extreme disparities between rich and poor, where the dystopic regime is generally so much better off than the underclass it doesn't need to bother with enforcing or influencing worldviews beyond basic security measure

In Atwood's Oryx and Crake, we learn of a society where the better off live in employer-owned compounds while the less fortunate live in cities referred to as "pleeblands":

“The house, the pool, the furniture – all belonged to the OrganInc Compound, where the top people lived. Increasingly, the middle-range execs and the junior scientists lived there too. Jimmy’s father said it was better that way, because nobody had to commute to work from the Modules. Despite the sterile transport corridors and the high-speed bullet trains, there was always a risk when you went through the city.”

“Jimmy had never been to the city. He’d only seen it on TV – endless billboards and neon signs and stretches of buildings, tall and short; endless dingy-looking streets, countless vehicles of all kinds, some of them with clouds of smoke coming out the back; thousands of people, hurrying, cheering, rioting. There were other cities too, near and far; some had better neighbourhoods in them, said his father, almost like the Compounds, with high walls around the houses, but those didn’t get on TV much.”

“Compound people didn’t go to the cities unless they had to, and then never alone. They called the cities the pleeblands. Despite the fingerprint identity cards now carried by everyone, public security in the pleeblands was leaky: there were people cruising around in those places who could forge anything and who might be anybody, not to mention the loose change – the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies. So it was best for everyone at OrganInc Farms to live all in one place, with foolproof procedures.”

“Outside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things were unpredictable. Inside, they were the way it used to be when Jimmy’s father was a kid, before things got so serious, or that’s what Jimmy’s father said. Jimmy’s mother said it was all artificial, it was just a theme park and you could never bring the old ways back, but Jimmy’s father said why knock it? You could walk around without fear, couldn’t you? Go for a bike ride, sit at a sidewalk café, buy an ice-cream cone? Jimmy knew his father was right, because he himself had done all of these things.”

“Still, the CorpSeCorps men – the ones Jimmy’s father called our people – these men had to be on constant alert.”

Excerpt From: Atwood, Margaret. “Oryx and Crake.” Anchor Books, 2004-03-30. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/f5Qiz.l

I'd highly recommend reading it, it's a great book.

This sounds somewhat close to the world depicted in the TV show "Incorporated".

Or Jennifer Government by Max Berry, which is just postcyberpunk, really.

I'd second that recommendation; one of the best-written examples of that type of dystopia.

> This material may be protected by copyright.

Posting a longish excerpt to give people a flavour of the book is covered by fair use. Otherwise literary criticism would grind to a halt.

And I don't see why you say it _may_ be copyrighted, it was only written in 2004 therefore it's undoubtedly copyrighted. But so what, it's perfectly fine to post snippets without the author's explicit permission. I suspect 99.99% of authors would give you their eternal blessing for disseminating and praising their work.

> I'd highly recommend reading it, it's a great book.

A dozen times this.

> Posting a longish excerpt to give people a flavour of the book is covered by fair use. Otherwise literary criticism would grind to a halt.

> And I don't see why you say it _may_ be copyrighted, it was only written in 2004 therefore it's undoubtedly copyrighted. But so what, it's perfectly fine to post snippets without the author's explicit permission. I suspect 99.99% of authors would give you their eternal blessing for disseminating and praising their work.

When I selected and copied the selections from iBooks, the "Excerpt From:..." and "Check out this book..." lines automatically appeared in my clipboard along with the selections. I figured I'd leave 'em there instead of deleting them.

But thank you for the fair use information, I'll keep that in mind in the future.

Great. I've never used iBooks so I don't know how it functions.

>The most obviously missed type would appear to be dystopians characterised by extreme disparities between rich and poor, where the dystopic regime is generally so much better off than the underclass it doesn't need to bother with enforcing or influencing worldviews beyond basic security measures (much of cyberpunk, for example).

The Brazilian TV series 3% is I think worth of mention, as it fits very well in this space.

Sure. Animal Farm - written by Orwell - is the prototypical Orwellian dystopia.

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