Hacker News Reader

Comment by paytonjjones | Hacker News Reader

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

There are many forms of dystopia and picking two that prominently feature absolute institutional control also seems like cherry picking.

The Hunger Games, World War Z, and Fallout are also dystopias.

View on HN

The hunger games is also about an authoritarian society with mass surveillance, though?

WWZ is about a literal zombie outbreak, and while I can't comment on whether the book is actually using it as a vehicle to critique or extrapolate real-world social systems, the movie sure as hell didn't.

Without going into a very long rant about Bethesda missing the point of Fallout as a universe, suffice it to say that it is also not intended to be a serious examination of what life might or even could become, ever. In fact, it was intended to be a platform for social critique via parody and caricaturism.

WWZ the movie takes almost nothing from the book beyond the title. Huge missed opportunity. The book uses a future history format and digs into practicalities. For example, people invent a new hand weapon optimized for killing zombies. They need it because firearms are too expensive, require too much skill to employ effectively in civilian areas. Still, conventional arms prove essential for large scale progress. IIRC much of the book focuses on the struggle to get from the initial chaos to manageable battle lines.

Overall I really enjoyed it. I should re-read it…

isn't fallout post-apocalypse?

and hunger games is about institutional control and rebelling against it

Dystopia just decomposes to "bad place", of which there are many and varied types

Yes, institutional control features heavily in The Hunger Games, but so do "reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions..." which is why it came to mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com