The Rise of Dystopian Fiction
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electricliterature.com
One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.
Most of the promising ideas from the 1940-1960s have been tried, and most achieved in the US. See the original General Motors Futurama from 1940, which was supposed to be a vision of 1960.[1] This optimism was during the depths of the Great Depression, the next 20 years contained a big war, and yet it all happened. Freeways - did that. Spreading out cities - did that. Tall buildings spaced far apart in open space - tried that, didn't work out well. Most of those goals were achieved at scale.
The 1964 GM Futurama [2] tries to be optimistic, but it totally missed as prediction. Moon bases. Arctic bases. Undersea bases. Roads through jungles built by giant mobile machines. Desalinization plants irrigating the desert. Extreme urban sprawl. "Neither terrain nor distance a deterrent to where men of the city build their homes." None of that got beyond the prototype stage. Nobody quite knew where to go from there.
In the 1970s, SF had an enthusiasm for big space habitats. That went nowhere; lift cost to orbit is just too high.
Today, nobody is even trying very hard to define a better future. (Well, Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but, face it, as real estate, Mars sucks. If you could get to Mars for free right now, it wouldn't be worth developing. Few deserts are, even ones with air.)
[1] https://youtu.be/tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk
I believe that The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry is fundamentally optimistic.[0] It builds on The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which is arguably also optimistic.
For America, we could start by implementing well-tested and proven measures that have been effective across the western world (universal health care, quality education, etc.)
How do you convince people to "dream small" when our instinct is to want to implement our ideas nationally? How do you incentivize people to [hopefully temporarily] decrease efficiency and increases costs in the search of something better?
The arklet population goes from 1500 to 7 after a civil war. The first thing the mole people do after coming up from underground is kill someone. After the timeskip, the majority of the text is about the cold war between the new factions, resulting in a brief battle.
There is a subplot about a hope for a better future, but after ten thousand years of constant war, the book doesn't produce much evidence that it's even possible.
Also, RE that arklet civil war - what the book clearly shows is that, even in the face of total annihilation of the human race, whatever unity and shared purpose there is, it takes one politician on a power trip to undo all of that and get people to start killing each other.
Seveneves is a very good book, but it's also one of the most depressing ones I've ever read. About the only positive thing it tells about humanity is that the survivors watched videos of people from "old Earth", and based on that, elected not to reinvent social media.
I suspect, though it's hard to prove, that we have the resources to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet: food, water, and shelter. And I think most visions of utopia would agree on that as an element.
But what we don't have enough for is everyone's greed. And as resources have grown, we've watched human greed grow to swallow most of that growth. Many people believe greed to be an inherent human attribute. So it's no wonder people have lost hope that human greed will ever be beaten, or that growth will outstrip greed. So far we've seen little evidence that greed cannot consume most progress indefinitely.
But I 100% with Animats agree that we lack direction. In fact, we got where we are by being directionless! Or maybe indirect would be a better world. But the fact still is, most of the things we enjoy today were not designed to be good or useful. They were designed to make most money.
And mind you, I appreciate how awesome the market economy is in automagically balancing the needs of people with resources available. But we got to the point where making more money is the primary motivation for everything. Not whether it's useful. Not whether it's high-quality. Only how much can it sell. And today, we've mastered all the ways to maximize sale value by avoiding creating useful, high-quality things.
This hurts me, deeply, because it means that in the adult world there isn't many people to talk with about anything serious. Even the desire is widely mocked in proffesional circles. "Business is most important". "If it doesn't focus on business needs, it's bad engineering". Professional growth matters only in so far as it lets you land a better job. Etc.
For me, a great leap towards utopia would be to somehow relegate the market to a supporting role, instead of using it as a sole arbiter of what should be done and how.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar...
Of course, some people do that, but those people don't succed in making lots of money, so we don't hear about them unless we actively seek that information out.
I suspect that the reason you don't see the greed that motivates so much of human action around you is that you, like me, are greedy. Time after time I've chosen jobs that made me money rather than improving the world. It's hard for me to look at greed in others without seeing the greed in myself.
But if you really want the market relegated to a secondary role, then you want a way to defeat greed, so that people stop letting greed for the most money dictate their actions.
[1] http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/broadacre-city-frank-lloyd-wr...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964418/ - Tomorrowland.
Yes, I know it's Disney. Yes, I know it's naïve. Yes, I know it has been criticized as having a weak plot by people who would prefer depressing shit. But it's also the single most positive thing I've seen made in the past 10 years. It just overflows with hope about the future. So I do strongly recommend watching it.
Daemon is a pretty good (occasionally farfetched) techno-thriller. But the sequel turns it all around and becomes - like nothing else I've read since Starship Troopers - a manifesto for an optimistic revolution.
It was written in 2010 - 7 years ago! - yet it seems completely up-to-date on modern, and emerging, tech. That's an indication of good science fiction. Imagine a mix of 'enabling' technologies: augmented reality, Tor, crypto-currencies, OpenBazaar, SciHub, AI, with the open source hacker ethic. There's enough ambiguity in characters and situations to make the reader think. And so many sections had me nodding appreciatively or hooting with laughter.
I'd love to see a good discussion on HN of the vision and tech in Freedom™.
The big thing that dates them is that Facebook and Microsoft, and maybe HTC, are poised to dominate VR/AR.
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing."
I don't think we as a society or even humanity ever shared a vision. Though you may be right, I think it has more to do with our advancing knowledge which is relegating humans to just an animal ( a biological machine ). We used to think we were special. The center of the universe endowed with an eternal soul. Now we know that we aren't the center of solar system let alone the universe. Science has debunked all notions of the "soul" and it's presence in our bodies/organs/etc. And advances in AI is making a mockery of human intelligence in many specific fields ( though not on general level yet ). And recent studies of our brain and consciousness is starting to remove our last "mystery" of ourselves. And as neuroscience advances more, the "special" nature of our "unique" consciousness will probably melt away like our theories about the soul. There is even talk amongst neuroscientists/philosophers/academics/etc that the brain is just a "predictive machine" and that our sense of our "self" may be an illusion.
And of course add to that the growing economic and power disparity between people and the elite and a better understanding of history which is tearing down all the fake facade of american primacy or "western" civilization or even world civilization.
It also doesn't help that china has surpassed the US as the world #1 economy in PPP terms and will surpass the US in nominal terms in a few years.
In other words, our problem is that we are becoming more "aware/knowledgable". As they say, ignorance is bliss.
.... seriously? The American Dream.
Technology (including surveillance technology) was the missing piece and we've closed that gap not long ago, making Oceania and World State a reality.
Now its up to the elected politicians to implement a particular incarnation of one of these novels.
There are more and more places in the world which look and feel like 1984 (or are quickly getting there), while a big chunk of the 'western' world lives in a Brave New World already.
I guess these books are so popular now not because of what might happen to our world in the future, but because of how accurately Orwell and Huxley described the world we live in today.
It's a brave new world until you resist, and then it's 1984.
Nothing against LA, but I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. Then I sort of got the idea that the point was to generally make us more humble so that we'd stop creating new technology and thus risking the environment.
Now I think we absolutely need technology to protect the environment. I also wonder what the effect of film-after-film implying how guilty and wicked we are has on the Western psyche. I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
Only? Why? (Pure curiousity, no judgement.)
Self-driving vehicles' practicality as a mass product, iirc, is currently dependent on not-yet-achieved processor hardware (ops per second, ops per watt, etc.) and battery energy density, without which they have insufficient visual-processing capabilities and range, respectively.
(Yes, those are hardware problems not political problems; still, not being an engineer in either of those fields I've no more agency over them than over political problems.)
Even after that, they will still be dependent on having not too many regulatory bottlenecks (cf. what the FAA has done to avionics for the past few decades) or legally-mandated misfeatures (cf. Cory Doctorow's Car Wars).
A lot of Dystopian fiction also celebrates the utopian few, usually of or descended from common people. Sure it might erode trust in large institutions, but a lot of it seems to support the concept that good people do exist and can make a difference.
I'd not sure it "erodes" so much as "reshapes".
To function, society depends on mass belief in many falsehoods and fictions. Teaching everyone the truth about everything will destroy any society.
Theres a very strong tension between true beliefs and beliefs that help people/societies survive.
If more people are aware of the truth than more people are equipped to act appropriately. And if more people knowing the truth means that societal systems collapse, then maybe we need new, better systems.
By your logic people should be tricked into believing fast food is healthy in order to help prop-up the US economy.
There is, but I think it's not about the truth value - it's about complexity. The society doesn't need to be told lies; it's just that the raw truth seems beyond what most people can handle.
Maybe it is solvable through education. A big reason why I see people having trouble with reality is that they were never taught to think in systems, and instead try to blame someone.
I'm in the top few percent intellectually but I'm not sure I do either, tbh. Maybe nobody does.
And as for institutions, it's fun to laugh at them while living in a world almost fully conditioned on the ongoing competence of those institutions.
Writer David Brin talks a lot about this in his article, "Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots", which I'll strongly recommend here.
That's the idea. Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales.
> I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.
That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end.
>>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.
>That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
Good point! Makes me think of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables. Must take another look. (If I recall correctly these are moral tales rather than pessimism, however.)
If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying to make money; to be famous.
Unconsciously: perhaps trying to project their despair onto the public. By attributing the feeling of despair to an external cause (which they help to create!) they get relief because they don't have to acknowledge and face it internally. Crazy, I know, but ultimately evil is unknowable and it's better not to dig too deep.
That depends heavily on the dystopia. In Perdido Street Station, for example, the characters do create meaningful change, though I can't imagine anyone considering that book uplifting.
I take your point, though, a lot of dystopic fiction does end with no progress. But I think that's not necessarily a statement of the possibility of change: we usually see the dystopia through the eyes of a single character in a short slice of their lives. It's a very American business, quarterly profits way of seeing things, to measure change in a single character's actions and vision. Change can be slower and larger than that.
> War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
-- George Orwell
There is no "Western psyche". Only individual people have one, and I for one write dystopian rap lyrics as a way to cleanse myself, to uplift myself -- and it works, too. You cannot polish a turd but you sure can make a shiny painting of it. It changes nothing, especially since in my case I don't much care for an audience, but it changes me. It reminds me to not give in when too many people around me do the opposite. If you are more shocked and depressed by being called an accomplice and tool of murderers than by all the countless people being dead, that's too much sympathy with the aggressor and too little with the victims. Not buying one bit of it, except I would agree that "The West" is not terribly special, just ahead in some respects, and that poor people can be dicks, too. It goes through all strata and all continents, but yeah, I'll just say it: most people aren't good enough, they haven't been given enough or didn't have the freedom to take enough as a child. They are like bonsai trees to the actual tree they should be, and that's why we get the results we get. Too big groups of too little people. And while I can't prevent what people do, but I can change my own habits and think thrice about whom I am loyal to and why. And you know, if everybody did just that, that would be more than enough. IMO one has to decide between the people who are and the people who should be, you can't serve two masters.
> A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
It really depends on what that knowledge and bravery are. I'm thinking of all sorts of action movies that are really just a glorification of fascism winning against "fascism plus $nasty_thing", and essentially just sits on the receptors for non-bullshit without not being bullshit. In contrast, the kind of things that leave me with a bad ending force me to resist, and to develop my own knowledge and bravery. Think "The Wire", for example. Too many happy endings, and you have bubble gum, too little hope, and you have a mouthful of dirt. But still:
> Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
-- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27th 1904
Aside from a good read, I feel that dystopian fiction is an excellent political commentary and an great view into our future. Books that make me think are my favourite.
Super excited about the upcoming Blade Runner movie.
Except.... I might've been excited for the Blade Runner sequel if I hadn't known Harrison Ford was in it. Had I been blind to that, could go in without knowing, maybe it would be ok.
To me, Blade Runner really improved upon its source material, and the unanswered and heavily hinted at question of "what is Deckard" is one of those improvements. That question made the story MORE like a PKD "question reality" story, and I love it for that reason.
Now that question is apparently answered, or perhaps shown to have never been a real question to begin with. I'll see the movie, because it still looks interesting, but I might just choose to box it into its own space, separate from the movie that spawned it.
Some things shouldn't have sequels.
Is there more than one book? I've only read the first.
There are sequel books, but only the first was written by PKD. He died before the movie came out (although he saw parts of it and gave it his blessing). The sequels were written by a friend of his.
I liked the movie, but the only real similarity to the book is character names.
Also, yes, to me the new Blade Runner is yet another signal that Hollywood is becoming focus tested to death.
A major theme in the novel is the idea that there's a significant difference between the real and the fake. The major characters are depressed, stuck in a world where almost all animals are fake, and there are even fake humans. In the novel, Rachael and the other androids do not have empathy; she throws his sheep off the roof of his building as revenge. The point of Deckard's mission (unlike the movie) isn't necessarily to show us that androids' lives also matter, it's to contrast the fake humans with the all-to-human Deckard. (This part is something of a gray area since we're only told that the Voigt-Kampff test works.)
But it's also true that the movie doesn't really make sense if Deckard is a replicant. First of all, he would be a pitiful replicant; he barely survives his encounter with them, and has none of their superhuman skills. But that's a technical point. But if he is a replicant, the movie has no arc -- it's the story about a guy who kills some replicants and maybe (we don't know) realizes that he himself is a replicant and has four years to live. It's not clever, and provides no emotional resonance.
But if Deckard is human, then it's a story about a man, trained to kill replicants, who learns the value of life, even if it's not natural life. In the movie, despite the existence of the Voigt-Kampff test, the replicants clearly have empathy -- Roy mourning Pris' death is an example. So Deckard, it can be argued, is a bad guy in the movie; he's killing living beings who were designed to be slaves and have escaped from their masters. And the movie is about how, in his pursuit of the replicants, is himself made to be hunted, and learns what it is like to be like (but not actually be) a replicant.
Thematically, the Deckard-is-human interpretation is much more resonant than the Deckard-is-a-replicant interpretation.
In addition, I don't think the replicants are meant to be without empathy, as much as having a skewed sense of empathy compared to normal humans - Rachel is detected after not distinguishing between eating oysters and boiled dog, for instance.
This paragraph is a common misinterpretation. Ray Bradbury wasn't writing about the dangers of government control or censorship... Those things were consequential and not causal. He viewed the 'firemen' depicted in his novel as a side effect of shallow television pervading culture and destroying any interest in books. His book probably has more in common with Huxley than Orwell. Bradbury says as much himself about the theme of Fahrenheit 451 and its misinterpretation:
> Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature...His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point. [1]
On another note, I've long considered the popularity of dystopian stories among teenagers to have an obvious cause: we put them in a suffocating, dystopian hellhole for 7+ hours per day and 5+ days per week. The majority of their lives are spent in an environment where authority is distant, absolute, and often lacking in empathy, and peers are often as dangerous as those authority figures. Paul Graham in particular discusses the dystopian nature of American schooling through the lens of nerds and popularity [2], and there are a few other articles I've read over the years which mention the notion that kids and teens relate to dystopian heroes precisely because of their own daily environment. [3]
Also surprising that the article doesn't mention Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I would place on the level with The Giver in terms of establishing the recent youth focus of dystopian fiction.
[1]: http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis...
[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
[3]: https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/
"Will Farnaby is a cynical journalist shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, a Buddhist paradise where modern science and technology is embraced only insofar as it can improve medicine and nutrition, not for industrialization; drugs are used for enlightenment, not for pacification; and the evils of corporatism are unknown."
"The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world."
The Culture series describes what is arguably the best possible science fiction society to live in. Player of Games is a good introduction to the series, which shows off what the Culture is by taking you, in the shoes of one of its denizens, to a place that's a high contrast.
David Brin always preaches scifi optimism, but I found Existence to be kind of a slog, so I never finished it - I think you'd agree with a lot of his writing, though.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Game...
The only popular utopian literature I can think of is Star Trek and all of their plots either involve characters leaving the utopia to explore or defending it from those who would destroy it.
A classical form of this conflict is the form of the interaction of a member (or group of members) of the non-utopian society (especially one with a strong pre-existing bias against the utopian society) thrust into the utopian society. Typically, the outsider is converted (if single; if there a multiple, the response is often that most convert, but having a minority of unconvinced holdouts isn't uncommon.)
Among others Walden Two and Ecotopia use variations of this.
* A happy ending: Things were going wrong, but there's at least one 'right' ending, where things go the way most would agree is positive.
* Only 'bad' endings: There might be a fight, you might even win the battle, but ultimately the war is lost.
I think that the popularity of each of these depends on how hopeful society in general (and the people consuming the works in specific) are about the future.
If we feel like there's no control or only bad routes left then the works with only 'less bad' endings will probably win.
(The "get the book" link on that site says it isn't available, but one can find it on Amazon.)
"Sperm Count Dropping in Western World"