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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Just always remember: it's a dystopia. It's not a happy positive uplifting book: the conclusion is intended as a genocidal, catastrophic nightmare.

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Exactly. It's a fantastic book and extremely fun, but in Stross' own words: "In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening."

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-she...

On it's origins (extreme burnout as a programmer in a high growth environment during the dot com boom):

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

I’ve found that dystopian sci fi has to be clear about this to the point of bashing the reader over the head with it, which unfortunately can ruin it as art.

Think of 1984 as a classic example, though good writing rescues that one as art. If the author hadn’t included a “Hannibal Lecture” from the party boss about what The Party actually was there would be trads and neoreactionaries praising it as a work about how great it is to have a state that provides meaning.

If you don’t do that you get people who think for example that Paul Atraides in Dune is Luke Skywalker and the monopolistic feudal system is good when he’s more of a tragic villain in a dystopia.

People even think the world backdrop of Neuromancer is cool. That would not be a cool place to live. The arc across the three books is really showing the twilight of humanity and the ascent of machine intelligence. We are reduced to the street life that William Gibson saw in the downtown East side of Vancouver while the machines take over.

Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy ending" genre, which I think is important to provide balance to all the literary genres as a whole, since many of them aren't exactly trying to make the reader depressed. That's not so much the goal of sci-fi authors either, but instead to make the readers think, which, yes can and often does drive is into the darker parts of what society, humanity and existence has to offer. It's important to have a functional place to approach these things, in my opinion, which is why I shy away from the utopia/optimistic stuff in the genre that rarely seems to gain the popularity the more darkly speculative and dystopian stuff does.

It's not for everyone, I guess. But it should be. Your 1984 example is fantastic since we are seeing this exact thing play out in US politics today, with a tyrannical group trying to usher in a police state and the sycophants that walk lock-step right along with it, enamored by the delusion that they are the good guys because their demagogues don't explicitly say the quiet part out loud.

William Gibson would object to the notion that the Sprawl is a dystopia though - at least not directly as one.

His point about it was that the conditions of the sprawl are a good deal better then the conditions huge, even the majority, of humanity live in today.[1]

[1] https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apo...

Plus, he considers that to be a positive world because it survived the Cold War, which definitely seemed doubtful in the 1980s.

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