15 ms·

How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

89 points by jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Leary 8y ago
This is very topical. If i had a dollar every time someone used Black Mirror as an argument against technology...
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  If I had ten cents every time a tech bro uses Heinlein to promote fascism.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    If I had a penny every time a counter-tech-bro HN contrarian uses Douglas Coupland to promote mild socialism.
    - nomadiccoder 8y ago
      if I had a halfpenny every time a reference went over my head...
- anon2775 8y ago
  It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions. Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. Ironically, this happens in the utopian case with Star Trek, which gets invoked as an example of a valid and functioning "post scarcity" society based on fabrication and automation, despite the technology in that series being essentially magic.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      The core of the Star Trek post-scarcity is a) near-free energy, and b) ubiquitous access to matter replicators. The replicator is kind of magic, but not total impossibility, and rough approximations are within realm of conceivable "future technology". But I think first and foremost, Star Trek is being brought as an example of post-scarcity so often because it's pretty much the only story that presented such society and reached general audience. It's pretty much a lone beacon of hope in the sea of dystopia. Still, I agree with your point. Star Trek is a nice dream, but not a good source of information for reasoning about reality.
      - ctchocula 8y ago
        Trekonomics is a nice non-fiction book about the utopian ideas presented in Star Trek and especially TNG. There, they treat the replicator as more of a metaphor for post-scarcity rather than recipe (i.e. Star Trek technology is sufficient but not necessary). I would say I'm more optimistic than you about post-scarcity. Bertrand Russell makes a case for the insanity of modern society by noting that during WWI half of British populace was sufficient to produce enough for all of Britain. Even if we allow for some margin of error in his statement, since that time productivity in the US has increased 4.5x since then. To me the show is increasingly relevant. For example, it presents a clear answer to a popular criticism to UBI: what is to prevent everyone from staying home to play video games and leeching off society? The optimistic answer is that once society can produce enough goods for everyone, the traditional value system of society (material wealth => proxy for contributions to society => virtue) loses meaning and will be overtaken by new ones (contributing to society => virtue). I agree with most of your summary except the end. What if the problems in the US and around the developed world are more due to how society is organized rather than technological? I think the Star Trek value system is appealing and IMO something we ought to strive for.
Animats 8y ago
Interesting. "In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions." Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build worlds like Charles Stross. It's also easier for readers. Reading Ian Banks is hard work. More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. We have no shared conceptual model of what a better future should look like. We did once, up to 1970 or so. To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present. ("Futures: 1) Utopia 2) Dystopia 3) the future in which your cell phone takes slightly better pictures.")
- skandl 8y ago
  Really good points. I found this video ("Is Utopia always Dystopia?") fascinating, delving into similar territory about expanding our idea of what utopia, and thus a better future, can be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n20ZbRJyKPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n20ZbRJyKPM
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- runn1ng 8y ago
  Phones today make really great pictures though.
- labster 8y ago
  One of the major arguments of postmodernism is that the "shared model" of modernist progress -- universal "progress" had some bad side effects. Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people. And modernity brought other new large problems, from global warming to weak communities to mass propaganda. There were so many excesses that we had to put on the brakes. That said, postmodernism does support a "whatever works" approach, and we desperately need some sort of positive futurism, lest we end up implementing the coal-powered AI hellscape by default.
gerdesj 8y ago
"In political science" - they assert this is science. This is how they decide what to test: "In formulating hypotheses, we draw from several theoretical traditions. The majority of our hypotheses flow from the nature of the content shared across dystopian narratives. We take each theoretical tradition in turn." This appears to describe the difference between fact and fantasy: "Scholars in the narrative persuasion tradition distinguish narrative from rhetorical persuasion, where the latter is characterized by advocacy of a position through arguments, reasoning, and evidence (e.g., newspaper editorials and political speeches). By contrast, narrative persuasion involves attitude change driven by cognitive and emotional engagement with a story." This is experiment three: "Finally, we test two key folk hypotheses, loosely connected to cultivation theory." Science is hard: "Yet an experimental manipulation involving an entire story narrative can be difficult to unpack and interpret." Overall, I found this paper hard to read (to be fair, I'm not used to seeing this style of thing but I have put some effort in - I read it!) and rather vapid.
- aesto 8y ago
  Perspectives on Politics isn't exactly a top-drawer journal. It's the sort of outlet where articles (often more on the philosophical side) end up that lack the scientific rigor necessary for the top-tier journals. Also, FYI, political science has a pretty contentious divide between people who favor a scientific approach and those who prefer a normative/philosophical approach. The two sides basically hate each other. So to claim that "In political science - they assert this is science" pretty much misses half of the story.
  - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
    I don't like the paper and think it's horribly crude. But Perspectives on Politics is a good journal.
sudofail 8y ago
This is something I've argued about a lot recently, and I think it's very important to be aware of. All too often in political debates, the subject of some dystopian scenario from fiction will come up. Fiction serves an important role in helping you to see other points of view, but it's even more important to keep in mind that it is just fiction. When people point to Atlas Shrugged or 1984 and cite some real world event that seems to back it up, it reaffirms the belief that we're heading towards that fictional dystopia. When in fact this is merely selection bias. Dystopian fiction is entertaining, but we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative. The world is much, much more complex than the fictional straw man world the author creates.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative “Any” is too strong. At the very least, fiction offers a lens into a society’s worldview.
- autokad 8y ago
  i like the genre, but I think we are going too far to the point its making people nuts. i do think our movies/shows/music have a huge causal impact on your moods/feelings, so we should be weary of how much we consume it. so now i treat dystopian shows like a beer, toxic but enjoyable in limited quantities. i also feel there story-lines are a bit trite. gee, another 'evil cooperation taking over everything' dystopia
devoply 8y ago
> that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly. America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the system from within for anything other than the most trivial issues is seen to the cynics seems impossible. The fact is that in the present mode of existence the only revolutions that do happen can only happen in fiction. Like for instance see the movie They Live! The protagonist finds himself completely alienated by his newly perceived reality and decides to chew gum and kick ass to get to the bottom of it, only to find that he's in a much deeper hole than something he can do anything about, the aliens run a galactic economic empire of which earth is just a small part -- which could be a pretty apt metaphor for individual existence or maybe the human condition -- even the most powerful can do little about the system. Who controls us? Maybe it's money or technology or a conspiracy, or God, or bacteria and viruses? So the message is one of revolution because those who are unhappy with reality as it is, can only rebel against it on the screen or in books... and do so idealistically without any sort of heavy handed intellectual exercise which might cause revolution in a hundred years -- like for instance Communism. The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.
- opwieurposiu 8y ago
  It seems kind of silly to argue that the democratic politics is legitimate and violence is not, when the whole point of the democratic state is to create a monopoly on violence. What fiction fails to teach you is that being good at violence is a lot of work! To be good at it you need to take krav or bjj or mma classes at least 3 times a week and go to the gun range at least once a week. I personally think society would gain vast benefits from making dueling legal again. Sadly the lawyers would never allow it because they would lose half their business!
  - devoply 8y ago
    Poe's law. Fact is a lot of the political propaganda in the media (including movies) is used by the State to manufacture consent to use violence... usually as State intervention to liberate people and to recruit soldiers to protect freedom and train them so that they become good at violence. For instance see this, https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/9ztk4l/cant_wait_for_the_beta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/9ztk4l/can... Regardless the political imagination of individuals as to what is right or wrong has very little impact on their ability to actually do much and hurt many people as individuals or even as political fringe groups, as the control mechanisms and technology to disrupt such individuals and groups is highly effective. However, when those groups become large movements perhaps they could possibly lead to some sort of uncontrollable and undesirable violence. Does that mean we should be weary of fiction writers promoting such themes, yes we should, if we're a country like China. It seems there is a movement to control all forms of speech these days as it's all starting to be considered dangerous... so you don't even have fiction as a refuge to express your revolution.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mirimir 8y ago
It's an interesting study for sure. But, as part of the background, it would have been useful to point out that much dystopian fiction is intentionally political. Rod Serling had initially proposed a program of political commentary, but CBS said "no way". So we got The Twilight Zone. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead series was also intentionally political. In other words, much dystopian fiction is actually long-form propaganda.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  I think a lot of it is rooted in the psychological warfare between Western liberalism and communism from the cold war onwards. Hell, postmodernism is largely based on socialist (actual socialist, not "left of libertarian") critiques of liberalism, and it seems to me that the postmodern tradition of criticising everything without providing a viable alternative is the root of a lot of dystopian ideas. Human history has been on the slow crawl from worse to better for a long time. We're living in the greatest era in history, but we still act like it's a horrible time to be alive.
  - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    What postmodernists are you referring to? I thought that as well, but after reading some actual postmodernists like Richard Rorty and Foucault I find it hard to support that idea any more. Most postmodern thinkers are left of center, sure, but I think that reflects a bias in academia more than a secret agenda.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      I'm thinking Derrida, Heidegger, and Horkheimer. I don't think there's any secret agenda going on, more that postmodernism - being built within a Marxist intellectual framework (not a conspiracy, this is well documented) - is inherently oriented towards critiquing and bringing down Western liberalism and capitalism. It doesn't take much effort to go from deconstructionism or critical theory to the kind of dystopian imagery we're talking about. I mean, most dystopian fiction is based on effectively "late-stage capitalism" conditions, and how such a system would degrade.
nreilly 8y ago
Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?
- mirimir 8y ago
  I think that Ian Banks' "Culture" series is pretty utopian. The AI Minds are clearly in charge, but they generally treat their human pets well, and with respect. There are effectively no limitations on what people can be, do or have. Except perhaps meaning, and that's a major theme. But there is a novella, State of the Art, which features contact between the Culture and 1980s Earth. And that is very dystopian. As are his treatments of various other civilizations that the Culture manipulates. Edit: grammar Also, many of those novels feature messaging threads among ship Minds. And some of them are mind-boggling.
  - nreilly 8y ago
    Thanks. I've got a couple of Ian Banks books in my to read list, but this will bump it up.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    Worth noting that the dystopian part of State of the Art is the Culture's view of Earth! One detail from the story that I love is the ship Mind's hobby of collecting individual snowflakes from the worlds it visits with a desire to find two identical snowflakes....
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Well, yes, it's the Culture's Minds' view of Earth. But arguably that's also Banks' view. Plus of course his view of the Culture. Also, some Culture citizens quite liked the Earth. However, they came off as rather crazy ;) There's a Mind in another novel who collects recordings of human minds, and experiments with them. Other Minds strongly disapprove. But then, the Culture overall experiments with other civilizations that it encounters. Also, it wasn't until I read State of the Art that I realized that the Culture is not part of Earth human future. I gather than he assumes humanoid panspermia and/or convergent evolution.
sn41 8y ago
I think additinonally, conversely, dystopian fiction is reflective of political attitudes - if you're in a repressive country and want to criticise the government, then you can write a fictional work criticising some other government - examples include "Memoirs found in a bathtub" by Stanislaw Lem and "We" by Zamyatin.
davidw 8y ago
Is anyone else sick of dystopian stuff? I want to read something where... sure, there are problems, but where people are out there doing difficult, adventurous and good things. Something maybe even kind of motivational. Or at best, just nice escapist stories without all the doom and gloom. If I want to read about stressful, bad, evil things, I'll pick up a newspaper.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Try Iain Banks, though IMO the world-building is better than the plots.
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    A world where humans have given up free will, all desire and drive, and live out meaningless lives noticed by no one (ffs, the greatest game player of the galaxy was worried he'd be forgotten in TWO YEARS - and he was, except by people who knew him personally!)? I do not think life as a pet of a machine is a happy future for humanity.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      What is happy future? Is it the same for you aa for others? Should we still group ourselves to one/more big groups, or should we maybe focus on individuals more, and let people group if they want to do so?
    - arethuza 8y ago
      I don't really recognise that description of the Culture - they have plenty of freedom (including the freedom to leave the Culture as individuals or groups) and to do practically anything they want (PoG has game players, large scale landscape designers). And there is plenty of desire and passion by the inhabitants of the Culture and they feel the need as individuals to be more "worthy" there is Contact or even Special Circumstances. What's not to like?
    - AllegedAlec 8y ago
      Pretty much this. Horza Gorbachul was completely correct in his assessment of the Culture.
omnimus 8y ago
Lately I have seen term Solarpunk on reddits, tumblrs and scuttlebutt thrown around. I think people start to realize we need positive ideas for future. Solarpunk is future where we make it, clean energy wins, automation will empower us instead of enslaving us. Maybe its time for some of that.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  post-cyberpunk is pretty positive too. It's basically near-future tech in a society not that far from our own, and the conflict comes from the exact kinds of conflicts we're starting to think about now around privacy, economic advantage, AI going wrong and so on. But it's not inherently dystopian like cyberpunk is.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Even traditional Gibsonian cyberpunk isn't really as dystopian as it is often presented as. I remember an interview with William Gibson where he said the fact that he assumed that there would be a civilization, even a flawed one, in the mid 21st century, was optimistic given that he was writing in the 1970s and 1980s when it was widely assumed that we would likely nuke ourselves into extinction in a few years.
- harimau777 8y ago
  I could see that working. Maybe the problem is that the current visions for a utopian future aren't inspiring. In other sci-fi you strap on a badass lightsaber/phaser/gun jump in your spaceship/mecha/Mad Max Muscle Car, and live by your own rules. In modern utopianism, private ownership of weapons is banned, everyone uses public transportation, everyone's vegan, etc. (I realize this is a bit of a stereotype, but I'm just trying to generalize/exaggerate to illustrate what I mean.) I'm not trying to say that futurists do something like militarize their vision of the future in order to be cool, but I do think they need to figure out a way to present a future that is compelling.

89 points by jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Leary 8y ago

This is very topical. If i had a dollar every time someone used Black Mirror as an argument against technology...

Gibbon1 8y ago
If I had ten cents every time a tech bro uses Heinlein to promote fascism.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  If I had a penny every time a counter-tech-bro HN contrarian uses Douglas Coupland to promote mild socialism.
  - nomadiccoder 8y ago
    if I had a halfpenny every time a reference went over my head...
anon2775 8y ago
It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions. Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.
- krapp 8y ago
  >It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. Ironically, this happens in the utopian case with Star Trek, which gets invoked as an example of a valid and functioning "post scarcity" society based on fabrication and automation, despite the technology in that series being essentially magic.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The core of the Star Trek post-scarcity is a) near-free energy, and b) ubiquitous access to matter replicators. The replicator is kind of magic, but not total impossibility, and rough approximations are within realm of conceivable "future technology". But I think first and foremost, Star Trek is being brought as an example of post-scarcity so often because it's pretty much the only story that presented such society and reached general audience. It's pretty much a lone beacon of hope in the sea of dystopia. Still, I agree with your point. Star Trek is a nice dream, but not a good source of information for reasoning about reality.
    - ctchocula 8y ago
      Trekonomics is a nice non-fiction book about the utopian ideas presented in Star Trek and especially TNG. There, they treat the replicator as more of a metaphor for post-scarcity rather than recipe (i.e. Star Trek technology is sufficient but not necessary). I would say I'm more optimistic than you about post-scarcity. Bertrand Russell makes a case for the insanity of modern society by noting that during WWI half of British populace was sufficient to produce enough for all of Britain. Even if we allow for some margin of error in his statement, since that time productivity in the US has increased 4.5x since then. To me the show is increasingly relevant. For example, it presents a clear answer to a popular criticism to UBI: what is to prevent everyone from staying home to play video games and leeching off society? The optimistic answer is that once society can produce enough goods for everyone, the traditional value system of society (material wealth => proxy for contributions to society => virtue) loses meaning and will be overtaken by new ones (contributing to society => virtue). I agree with most of your summary except the end. What if the problems in the US and around the developed world are more due to how society is organized rather than technological? I think the Star Trek value system is appealing and IMO something we ought to strive for.

Animats 8y ago

Interesting. "In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions." Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build worlds like Charles Stross. It's also easier for readers. Reading Ian Banks is hard work. More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. We have no shared conceptual model of what a better future should look like. We did once, up to 1970 or so. To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present. ("Futures: 1) Utopia 2) Dystopia 3) the future in which your cell phone takes slightly better pictures.")

skandl 8y ago
Really good points. I found this video ("Is Utopia always Dystopia?") fascinating, delving into similar territory about expanding our idea of what utopia, and thus a better future, can be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n20ZbRJyKPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n20ZbRJyKPM
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
runn1ng 8y ago
Phones today make really great pictures though.
labster 8y ago
One of the major arguments of postmodernism is that the "shared model" of modernist progress -- universal "progress" had some bad side effects. Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people. And modernity brought other new large problems, from global warming to weak communities to mass propaganda. There were so many excesses that we had to put on the brakes. That said, postmodernism does support a "whatever works" approach, and we desperately need some sort of positive futurism, lest we end up implementing the coal-powered AI hellscape by default.

gerdesj 8y ago

"In political science" - they assert this is science. This is how they decide what to test: "In formulating hypotheses, we draw from several theoretical traditions. The majority of our hypotheses flow from the nature of the content shared across dystopian narratives. We take each theoretical tradition in turn." This appears to describe the difference between fact and fantasy: "Scholars in the narrative persuasion tradition distinguish narrative from rhetorical persuasion, where the latter is characterized by advocacy of a position through arguments, reasoning, and evidence (e.g., newspaper editorials and political speeches). By contrast, narrative persuasion involves attitude change driven by cognitive and emotional engagement with a story." This is experiment three: "Finally, we test two key folk hypotheses, loosely connected to cultivation theory." Science is hard: "Yet an experimental manipulation involving an entire story narrative can be difficult to unpack and interpret." Overall, I found this paper hard to read (to be fair, I'm not used to seeing this style of thing but I have put some effort in - I read it!) and rather vapid.

aesto 8y ago
Perspectives on Politics isn't exactly a top-drawer journal. It's the sort of outlet where articles (often more on the philosophical side) end up that lack the scientific rigor necessary for the top-tier journals. Also, FYI, political science has a pretty contentious divide between people who favor a scientific approach and those who prefer a normative/philosophical approach. The two sides basically hate each other. So to claim that "In political science - they assert this is science" pretty much misses half of the story.
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago
  I don't like the paper and think it's horribly crude. But Perspectives on Politics is a good journal.

sudofail 8y ago

This is something I've argued about a lot recently, and I think it's very important to be aware of. All too often in political debates, the subject of some dystopian scenario from fiction will come up. Fiction serves an important role in helping you to see other points of view, but it's even more important to keep in mind that it is just fiction. When people point to Atlas Shrugged or 1984 and cite some real world event that seems to back it up, it reaffirms the belief that we're heading towards that fictional dystopia. When in fact this is merely selection bias. Dystopian fiction is entertaining, but we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative. The world is much, much more complex than the fictional straw man world the author creates.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative “Any” is too strong. At the very least, fiction offers a lens into a society’s worldview.
autokad 8y ago
i like the genre, but I think we are going too far to the point its making people nuts. i do think our movies/shows/music have a huge causal impact on your moods/feelings, so we should be weary of how much we consume it. so now i treat dystopian shows like a beer, toxic but enjoyable in limited quantities. i also feel there story-lines are a bit trite. gee, another 'evil cooperation taking over everything' dystopia

devoply 8y ago

> that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly. America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the system from within for anything other than the most trivial issues is seen to the cynics seems impossible. The fact is that in the present mode of existence the only revolutions that do happen can only happen in fiction. Like for instance see the movie They Live! The protagonist finds himself completely alienated by his newly perceived reality and decides to chew gum and kick ass to get to the bottom of it, only to find that he's in a much deeper hole than something he can do anything about, the aliens run a galactic economic empire of which earth is just a small part -- which could be a pretty apt metaphor for individual existence or maybe the human condition -- even the most powerful can do little about the system. Who controls us? Maybe it's money or technology or a conspiracy, or God, or bacteria and viruses? So the message is one of revolution because those who are unhappy with reality as it is, can only rebel against it on the screen or in books... and do so idealistically without any sort of heavy handed intellectual exercise which might cause revolution in a hundred years -- like for instance Communism. The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.

opwieurposiu 8y ago
It seems kind of silly to argue that the democratic politics is legitimate and violence is not, when the whole point of the democratic state is to create a monopoly on violence. What fiction fails to teach you is that being good at violence is a lot of work! To be good at it you need to take krav or bjj or mma classes at least 3 times a week and go to the gun range at least once a week. I personally think society would gain vast benefits from making dueling legal again. Sadly the lawyers would never allow it because they would lose half their business!
- devoply 8y ago
  Poe's law. Fact is a lot of the political propaganda in the media (including movies) is used by the State to manufacture consent to use violence... usually as State intervention to liberate people and to recruit soldiers to protect freedom and train them so that they become good at violence. For instance see this, https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/9ztk4l/cant_wait_for_the_beta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/9ztk4l/can... Regardless the political imagination of individuals as to what is right or wrong has very little impact on their ability to actually do much and hurt many people as individuals or even as political fringe groups, as the control mechanisms and technology to disrupt such individuals and groups is highly effective. However, when those groups become large movements perhaps they could possibly lead to some sort of uncontrollable and undesirable violence. Does that mean we should be weary of fiction writers promoting such themes, yes we should, if we're a country like China. It seems there is a movement to control all forms of speech these days as it's all starting to be considered dangerous... so you don't even have fiction as a refuge to express your revolution.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mirimir 8y ago

It's an interesting study for sure. But, as part of the background, it would have been useful to point out that much dystopian fiction is intentionally political. Rod Serling had initially proposed a program of political commentary, but CBS said "no way". So we got The Twilight Zone. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead series was also intentionally political. In other words, much dystopian fiction is actually long-form propaganda.

beaconstudios 8y ago
I think a lot of it is rooted in the psychological warfare between Western liberalism and communism from the cold war onwards. Hell, postmodernism is largely based on socialist (actual socialist, not "left of libertarian") critiques of liberalism, and it seems to me that the postmodern tradition of criticising everything without providing a viable alternative is the root of a lot of dystopian ideas. Human history has been on the slow crawl from worse to better for a long time. We're living in the greatest era in history, but we still act like it's a horrible time to be alive.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  What postmodernists are you referring to? I thought that as well, but after reading some actual postmodernists like Richard Rorty and Foucault I find it hard to support that idea any more. Most postmodern thinkers are left of center, sure, but I think that reflects a bias in academia more than a secret agenda.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    I'm thinking Derrida, Heidegger, and Horkheimer. I don't think there's any secret agenda going on, more that postmodernism - being built within a Marxist intellectual framework (not a conspiracy, this is well documented) - is inherently oriented towards critiquing and bringing down Western liberalism and capitalism. It doesn't take much effort to go from deconstructionism or critical theory to the kind of dystopian imagery we're talking about. I mean, most dystopian fiction is based on effectively "late-stage capitalism" conditions, and how such a system would degrade.

nreilly 8y ago

Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?

mirimir 8y ago
I think that Ian Banks' "Culture" series is pretty utopian. The AI Minds are clearly in charge, but they generally treat their human pets well, and with respect. There are effectively no limitations on what people can be, do or have. Except perhaps meaning, and that's a major theme. But there is a novella, State of the Art, which features contact between the Culture and 1980s Earth. And that is very dystopian. As are his treatments of various other civilizations that the Culture manipulates. Edit: grammar Also, many of those novels feature messaging threads among ship Minds. And some of them are mind-boggling.
- nreilly 8y ago
  Thanks. I've got a couple of Ian Banks books in my to read list, but this will bump it up.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Worth noting that the dystopian part of State of the Art is the Culture's view of Earth! One detail from the story that I love is the ship Mind's hobby of collecting individual snowflakes from the worlds it visits with a desire to find two identical snowflakes....
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Well, yes, it's the Culture's Minds' view of Earth. But arguably that's also Banks' view. Plus of course his view of the Culture. Also, some Culture citizens quite liked the Earth. However, they came off as rather crazy ;) There's a Mind in another novel who collects recordings of human minds, and experiments with them. Other Minds strongly disapprove. But then, the Culture overall experiments with other civilizations that it encounters. Also, it wasn't until I read State of the Art that I realized that the Culture is not part of Earth human future. I gather than he assumes humanoid panspermia and/or convergent evolution.

sn41 8y ago

I think additinonally, conversely, dystopian fiction is reflective of political attitudes - if you're in a repressive country and want to criticise the government, then you can write a fictional work criticising some other government - examples include "Memoirs found in a bathtub" by Stanislaw Lem and "We" by Zamyatin.

davidw 8y ago

Is anyone else sick of dystopian stuff? I want to read something where... sure, there are problems, but where people are out there doing difficult, adventurous and good things. Something maybe even kind of motivational. Or at best, just nice escapist stories without all the doom and gloom. If I want to read about stressful, bad, evil things, I'll pick up a newspaper.

ahartmetz 8y ago
Try Iain Banks, though IMO the world-building is better than the plots.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  A world where humans have given up free will, all desire and drive, and live out meaningless lives noticed by no one (ffs, the greatest game player of the galaxy was worried he'd be forgotten in TWO YEARS - and he was, except by people who knew him personally!)? I do not think life as a pet of a machine is a happy future for humanity.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    What is happy future? Is it the same for you aa for others? Should we still group ourselves to one/more big groups, or should we maybe focus on individuals more, and let people group if they want to do so?
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I don't really recognise that description of the Culture - they have plenty of freedom (including the freedom to leave the Culture as individuals or groups) and to do practically anything they want (PoG has game players, large scale landscape designers). And there is plenty of desire and passion by the inhabitants of the Culture and they feel the need as individuals to be more "worthy" there is Contact or even Special Circumstances. What's not to like?
  - AllegedAlec 8y ago
    Pretty much this. Horza Gorbachul was completely correct in his assessment of the Culture.

omnimus 8y ago

Lately I have seen term Solarpunk on reddits, tumblrs and scuttlebutt thrown around. I think people start to realize we need positive ideas for future. Solarpunk is future where we make it, clean energy wins, automation will empower us instead of enslaving us. Maybe its time for some of that.

beaconstudios 8y ago
post-cyberpunk is pretty positive too. It's basically near-future tech in a society not that far from our own, and the conflict comes from the exact kinds of conflicts we're starting to think about now around privacy, economic advantage, AI going wrong and so on. But it's not inherently dystopian like cyberpunk is.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Even traditional Gibsonian cyberpunk isn't really as dystopian as it is often presented as. I remember an interview with William Gibson where he said the fact that he assumed that there would be a civilization, even a flawed one, in the mid 21st century, was optimistic given that he was writing in the 1970s and 1980s when it was widely assumed that we would likely nuke ourselves into extinction in a few years.
harimau777 8y ago
I could see that working. Maybe the problem is that the current visions for a utopian future aren't inspiring. In other sci-fi you strap on a badass lightsaber/phaser/gun jump in your spaceship/mecha/Mad Max Muscle Car, and live by your own rules. In modern utopianism, private ownership of weapons is banned, everyone uses public transportation, everyone's vegan, etc. (I realize this is a bit of a stereotype, but I'm just trying to generalize/exaggerate to illustrate what I mean.) I'm not trying to say that futurists do something like militarize their vision of the future in order to be cool, but I do think they need to figure out a way to present a future that is compelling.