10 ms·

The Rise of Dystopian Fiction

78 points by fern12 9y ago

roceasta 9y ago
Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near future, and it's raining. 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.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >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.)
  - roceasta 9y ago
    Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engenders despair and nihilism imo.
  - slededit 9y ago
    It's important to distill a sense of agency in children. That they can control at least some aspects of their future. In my opinion one of societies current ailes is that we underestimate the amount of agency individuals have in society.
    - mmirate 9y ago
      Underestimated? These "underestimations" seem very accurate to me, and without a 300-million-person hive-mind, I can't imagine anything different. Any single person who isn't a politician, intelligence agent, etc., is meaningless today, and no single cause is capable of rallying enough popular support to have any impact in the first-past-the-post polls.
      - slededit 9y ago
        You don't need an election to make your own way in life.
        mmirate 9y ago
        Well, there aren't any more unsolved problems that aren't touched by politics (n.b. this wasn't the case back when CS was a new field and better algorithms were being discovered left and right), and it's no easier to get into a royal family than to get the right person elected.
        slededit 9y ago
        With respect I think that's a very myopic view. I don't think one should build their life around "problems" regardless but if you choose to do so there are two revolutions happening simultaneously. Self driving vehicles were Sci Fi just a few years ago, and Bitcoin is changing how we think of currency.
        mmirate 9y ago
        If the SEC performs a particular action, Bitcoin can be deep-sixed, at least domestically, and since the US likes to export its laws (cf. copyright), probably worldwide in time. 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).
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I think those stories are actively eroding the fabric of the society. Note that in most dystopian fiction, the society and its institutions are either incompetent or outright evil. People keep reading/watching those stories, and just through availability heuristic, it colors the way they see the world.
  - scottLobster 9y ago
    To be fair, by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil. I'm not so sure if that piece of the coloring is so inaccurate. By contrast the old ideas of corporate loyalty and blind patriotism seem laughably naive knowing what we know these days. 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".
    - Banthum 9y ago
      It can be true, but still harmful. 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.
      - liberte82 9y ago
        Can you give some examples?
        interfixus 9y ago
        I see at least one elephant in the room: Religion.
        liberte82 9y ago
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. 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.
  - roceasta 9y ago
    >Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales. 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.)
    - btrask 9y ago
      > 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. If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
      - Jtsummers 9y ago
        The authors may not believe it as a philosophy. But it's the philosophy their stories present.
      - roceasta 9y ago
        Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are. 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.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
  "Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what kind of technology, made by whom and why, used how and why. > 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
frandroid 9y ago
How could they forget Revelations?
- s_kilk 9y ago
  Wouldn't Revelations be Apocalyptic, rather than Dystopian?
delegate 9y ago
Talking about 1984 and A Brave New World, I think these might have been dystopian in the past, but not now. 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.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  The way I have been putting it is like this: It's a brave new world until you resist, and then it's 1984.
- clarkmoody 9y ago
  Perhaps children are forced to read these books in school precisely because it causes them to hate them. That way, they are sure to avoid those books at all costs later in life, when the lessons are more readily received.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Are these books mandatory reading? Where?
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  How is Brave New World really all that dystopian? If you're highly conservative and think having big families and lots of babies is your life's goal, then sure, BNW is going to seem hellish. But considering today's low birthrates, and the fact that so many children in rich nations are born into poverty, BNW seems to offer a better society in many ways. Most other dystopian sci-fi predicts a future plagued by wars, violence, a breakdown of the rule of law, extreme unfairness or gap between haves and have-nots, and other factors which generally lead to the majority of the population being downright miserable. 1984 had constant wars and ubiquitous surveillance by the state looking for "thoughtcrime". Elysium had a society where the elites lived in nice orbiting habitats and everyone else lived in squalor on the surface. The Running Man (the movie) had an authoritarian government shooting people in food riots and using a game show to pacify people and keep them from rebelling, with most people starving but a few elites living well (again, similar to 1984--the "outer party" members had decent standards of living but the "proles" didn't). Honestly, BNW sounds like a step up from today's world: plenty of casual sex (lots of people already do this now), no worries about child-support payments, no kids raised by welfare mothers, kids raised by professionals instead of by asshole parents who disown them at 18 because they didn't turn out the way they wanted (honestly, I think I see one of these every day on /r/personalfinance), no failed marriages (because no one gets married: today's marriage stats show that it's a failure of an institution with less than 50% success rate, and today's singledom stats show that fewer people are even bothering to give it a first try). It's a big departure from traditional society to be sure, but all indications are that the traditional society of the past is no longer working for us. From the article: "Today, we can define dystopia as 'an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.'" (This definition comes from the OED.) BNW does depict a totalitarian system, but not an environmentally degraded one, nor one where everything is unpleasant or bad. In fact, it isn't even completely totalitarian: people who don't fit in are allowed to opt out, and become "savages", living outside the society. Normal totalitarian systems don't do that: you can't leave, and people who try are usually shot, as became infamous in Berlin during the Cold War. The society of BNW may not seem wonderful to many people today, but to the people living in that fictional society, all indications were that they were quite happy with their lives.
divenorth 9y ago
I've always loved Dystopian novels. Even in the late 90's when I was in high school I thought Brave New World and 1984 were awesome. I'm glad the trend is back. 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.
- cydonian_monk 9y ago
  Agreed. I too have always been a fan of the sub-genre. 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.
  - divenorth 9y ago
    From what I remember from the book it was pretty clear what Deckard is. But I agree, I liked the movie ending. Is there more than one book? I've only read the first.
    - tnecniv 9y ago
      Actually nobody who worked on the movie could decide on what Deckard is. The writers originally wanted to make it ambiguous, and Ridley Scott made his opinion known by adding the dream sequence in the directors cut. 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.
    - bryanrasmussen 9y ago
sfRattan 9y ago
> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned. 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-misinterpreted-2149125 http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis... [2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html [3]: https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/ https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/
pmontra 9y ago
I used to like dystopian fiction but now that reality is becoming dystopic I don't feel like reading that genre anymore. I watch/read news (and HN) and I'm done.
- liberte82 9y ago
  Yes. We seek a balance in our fiction, good/boring times demand grit in our fiction and vice versa. This is why I (and many others) are more excited about The Orville than the new Star Trek series, which looks like more torture porn.
taheca 9y ago
Question: Will people tire of Dystopian? Does anyone out there think there is a market for Utopian literature? Speculating how we can fix and improve things?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I hope there is. I'm definitely interested; in fact, I'm actively seeking out positive, hopeful sci-fi now.
  - rfrank 9y ago
    Island, by Huxley "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." https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797 https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Those books exist. Daemon and FreedomTM are one pair of books that might be right up your alley. 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/6665847-daemon https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Game... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence
  - 9y ago
Animats 9y ago
This is very true in SF. It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. If you exclude all the paranormal stuff (werewolves/vampires/zombies/etc), it's even harder. 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 https://youtu.be/tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk
- mirimir 9y ago
  > It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. 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. 0) http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf
- elorant 9y ago
  Try "The Martian". Best SF book I've read in ages and very inspiring.
- liberte82 9y ago
qaute 9y ago
Recent-ish optimistic sci-fi written because of this: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/ http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Thanks, just bought it! (The "get the book" link on that site says it isn't available, but one can find it on Amazon.)
qaute 9y ago
Recent-ish (2014) optimistic sci-fi ostensibly written because of exactly this: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/ http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/. It's pretty good, too.
awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
Just wanted to point out that it isn't just fiction that is dystopian... "Sperm Count Dropping in Western World" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796

78 points by fern12 9y ago

Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near future, and it's raining. 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.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
>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.)
- roceasta 9y ago
  Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engenders despair and nihilism imo.
- slededit 9y ago
  It's important to distill a sense of agency in children. That they can control at least some aspects of their future. In my opinion one of societies current ailes is that we underestimate the amount of agency individuals have in society.
  - mmirate 9y ago
    Underestimated? These "underestimations" seem very accurate to me, and without a 300-million-person hive-mind, I can't imagine anything different. Any single person who isn't a politician, intelligence agent, etc., is meaningless today, and no single cause is capable of rallying enough popular support to have any impact in the first-past-the-post polls.
    - slededit 9y ago
      You don't need an election to make your own way in life.
      - mmirate 9y ago
        Well, there aren't any more unsolved problems that aren't touched by politics (n.b. this wasn't the case back when CS was a new field and better algorithms were being discovered left and right), and it's no easier to get into a royal family than to get the right person elected.
        slededit 9y ago
        With respect I think that's a very myopic view. I don't think one should build their life around "problems" regardless but if you choose to do so there are two revolutions happening simultaneously. Self driving vehicles were Sci Fi just a few years ago, and Bitcoin is changing how we think of currency.
        mmirate 9y ago
        If the SEC performs a particular action, Bitcoin can be deep-sixed, at least domestically, and since the US likes to export its laws (cf. copyright), probably worldwide in time. 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).
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I think those stories are actively eroding the fabric of the society. Note that in most dystopian fiction, the society and its institutions are either incompetent or outright evil. People keep reading/watching those stories, and just through availability heuristic, it colors the way they see the world.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  To be fair, by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil. I'm not so sure if that piece of the coloring is so inaccurate. By contrast the old ideas of corporate loyalty and blind patriotism seem laughably naive knowing what we know these days. 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".
  - Banthum 9y ago
    It can be true, but still harmful. 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.
    - liberte82 9y ago
      Can you give some examples?
      - interfixus 9y ago
        I see at least one elephant in the room: Religion.
        liberte82 9y ago
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. 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.
- roceasta 9y ago
  >Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales. 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.)
  - btrask 9y ago
    > 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. If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
    - Jtsummers 9y ago
      The authors may not believe it as a philosophy. But it's the philosophy their stories present.
    - roceasta 9y ago
      Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are. 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.
thinkfurther 9y ago
"Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what kind of technology, made by whom and why, used how and why. > 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

frandroid 9y ago

How could they forget Revelations?

s_kilk 9y ago
Wouldn't Revelations be Apocalyptic, rather than Dystopian?

delegate 9y ago

Talking about 1984 and A Brave New World, I think these might have been dystopian in the past, but not now. 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.

arca_vorago 9y ago
The way I have been putting it is like this: It's a brave new world until you resist, and then it's 1984.
clarkmoody 9y ago
Perhaps children are forced to read these books in school precisely because it causes them to hate them. That way, they are sure to avoid those books at all costs later in life, when the lessons are more readily received.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Are these books mandatory reading? Where?
gorkonsine 9y ago
How is Brave New World really all that dystopian? If you're highly conservative and think having big families and lots of babies is your life's goal, then sure, BNW is going to seem hellish. But considering today's low birthrates, and the fact that so many children in rich nations are born into poverty, BNW seems to offer a better society in many ways. Most other dystopian sci-fi predicts a future plagued by wars, violence, a breakdown of the rule of law, extreme unfairness or gap between haves and have-nots, and other factors which generally lead to the majority of the population being downright miserable. 1984 had constant wars and ubiquitous surveillance by the state looking for "thoughtcrime". Elysium had a society where the elites lived in nice orbiting habitats and everyone else lived in squalor on the surface. The Running Man (the movie) had an authoritarian government shooting people in food riots and using a game show to pacify people and keep them from rebelling, with most people starving but a few elites living well (again, similar to 1984--the "outer party" members had decent standards of living but the "proles" didn't). Honestly, BNW sounds like a step up from today's world: plenty of casual sex (lots of people already do this now), no worries about child-support payments, no kids raised by welfare mothers, kids raised by professionals instead of by asshole parents who disown them at 18 because they didn't turn out the way they wanted (honestly, I think I see one of these every day on /r/personalfinance), no failed marriages (because no one gets married: today's marriage stats show that it's a failure of an institution with less than 50% success rate, and today's singledom stats show that fewer people are even bothering to give it a first try). It's a big departure from traditional society to be sure, but all indications are that the traditional society of the past is no longer working for us. From the article: "Today, we can define dystopia as 'an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.'" (This definition comes from the OED.) BNW does depict a totalitarian system, but not an environmentally degraded one, nor one where everything is unpleasant or bad. In fact, it isn't even completely totalitarian: people who don't fit in are allowed to opt out, and become "savages", living outside the society. Normal totalitarian systems don't do that: you can't leave, and people who try are usually shot, as became infamous in Berlin during the Cold War. The society of BNW may not seem wonderful to many people today, but to the people living in that fictional society, all indications were that they were quite happy with their lives.

divenorth 9y ago

I've always loved Dystopian novels. Even in the late 90's when I was in high school I thought Brave New World and 1984 were awesome. I'm glad the trend is back. 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.

cydonian_monk 9y ago
Agreed. I too have always been a fan of the sub-genre. 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.
- divenorth 9y ago
  From what I remember from the book it was pretty clear what Deckard is. But I agree, I liked the movie ending. Is there more than one book? I've only read the first.
  - tnecniv 9y ago
    Actually nobody who worked on the movie could decide on what Deckard is. The writers originally wanted to make it ambiguous, and Ridley Scott made his opinion known by adding the dream sequence in the directors cut. 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.
  - bryanrasmussen 9y ago

sfRattan 9y ago

> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned. 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-misinterpreted-2149125 http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis... [2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html [3]: https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/ https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/

pmontra 9y ago

I used to like dystopian fiction but now that reality is becoming dystopic I don't feel like reading that genre anymore. I watch/read news (and HN) and I'm done.

liberte82 9y ago
Yes. We seek a balance in our fiction, good/boring times demand grit in our fiction and vice versa. This is why I (and many others) are more excited about The Orville than the new Star Trek series, which looks like more torture porn.

taheca 9y ago

Question: Will people tire of Dystopian? Does anyone out there think there is a market for Utopian literature? Speculating how we can fix and improve things?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I hope there is. I'm definitely interested; in fact, I'm actively seeking out positive, hopeful sci-fi now.
- rfrank 9y ago
  Island, by Huxley "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." https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797 https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Those books exist. Daemon and FreedomTM are one pair of books that might be right up your alley. 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/6665847-daemon https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Game... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence
- 9y ago

Animats 9y ago

This is very true in SF. It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. If you exclude all the paranormal stuff (werewolves/vampires/zombies/etc), it's even harder. 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 https://youtu.be/tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk

mirimir 9y ago
> It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. 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. 0) http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf
elorant 9y ago
Try "The Martian". Best SF book I've read in ages and very inspiring.
liberte82 9y ago

qaute 9y ago

Recent-ish optimistic sci-fi written because of this: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/ http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Thanks, just bought it! (The "get the book" link on that site says it isn't available, but one can find it on Amazon.)

qaute 9y ago

Recent-ish (2014) optimistic sci-fi ostensibly written because of exactly this: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/ http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/. It's pretty good, too.

awkwarddaturtle 9y ago

Just wanted to point out that it isn't just fiction that is dystopian... "Sperm Count Dropping in Western World" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796