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Funny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong about the consequences. Make Room! Make Room! [1966] The world is overpopulated at
by apo 8y ago
Funny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong about the consequences.
Make Room! Make Room! [1966]
The world is overpopulated at 7 billion people, with 35 million people in New York City alone. The inspiration for the film Soylent Green (1973).
Maybe not surprising, but worth noting anyway just how pessimistic these stories are.
- brlewis 8y agoTry getting a publisher to accept a book about a future world that's somewhat cleaner and more convenient than today. I can't wait for the movie version.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoWeeelllll... isn't that what the Culture series by Iain Banks was about - a vision of post-scarcity utopian future? As for movie version, I'd wager Star Trek, at least up to Discovery, was similarly about a vision of a better society (to the point that, as I discussed with few of my friends and colleagues, for a lot of us it has subconsciously shaped our political thinking: "Is this law / action on the path to Star Trek future, or not":)
- alexgmcm 8y agoYeah - but now write a movie about a future that's more or less the same except stuff is slightly better and my phone has a nicer camera. Slow, gradual improvement isn't as exciting as disaster and apocalypse.
- ianai 8y agoLove utopian stories. But I think they’re much more difficult to write since they’re fewer, or something. Modern sci-fi is downright jaded. They don’t bother to introduce technology half the time. It’s jusr taken as a given that the guns shoot colored fireballs or death rays. All transportation just floats around, etc. and people mostly scrap by on whatever they can find and die often.
- krapp 8y agoI think they're more difficult to write because they're more difficult to imagine, plausibly. I can imagine a future with energy weapons and flying cars, but one in which corporations and governments don't leverage technology to oppress and enslave the masses, where the rich don't get richer and the poor don't die like dogs, just seems like propaganda.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoThe thing is that you can have that without making it such an active point. One of the things I really like about Snow Crash is that while overall it's an anarcho-capitalistic dystopia where criminal organizations are incorporated, no one's actively wingeing about it, its just a setting to the main plot.
- ianai 8y agoStar Trek serialized it (seemingly) easily enough. They essentially got a new universe of problems to explore every episode with the context of the Federations technology and administration.
- rsynnott 8y agoStar Trek's society never made much _sense_, though. If you exclude all the utopian speeches given by Picard, and just look at the interaction of the Federation and Starfleet, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a military dictatorship. (Pet theory; the Federation is a Soviet-ish military command economy. The episodes we see are in-universe propaganda produced by the state. That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes.) I think Banks' Culture is a better example of a utopia played straight, but most of the action in those novels takes place largely outside the Culture.
- krapp 8y ago>That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. That is literally what they are, they're intended to act as mirrors to various aspects of humanity, or embody singular aspects of the plot of the week.
- rsynnott 8y agoThe Culture series are mostly about the Culture rubbing up against far less utopian societies, though; a pure story about a utopia would be boring.
- andygates 8y agoIt would probably be a long party and psychodrama. Intensely interesting to the participants, but we're not them.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSounds like most episodes of Black Mirror. And they certainly offer cleaner and more convenient futures, just the opposite of utopian in concept and in tone.
- vidarh 8y agoOne of the Culture novels do include a lengthy descriptions of a party that had lasted a ridiculously long time. Hydrogen Sonata possibly... There are quite a few descriptions of utopian societies partying in sci fi, but usually as an excuse to make one group or another stand out as gloriously debauched to set up the inevitable downturn when someone crashes the party or some character or other at the party is forced to face real life. But they can be interesting stories in their own right - just probably not easy to expand to novel length.
- perl4ever 8y ago"The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it. There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one. One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
- brlewis 8y agoI haven't kept up with sci fi for a long time so I had to google Culture Series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_the_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_... Sounds like the utopian culture of the protagonists is surrounded by plenty of non-utopian drama. Star Trek - a future where I might die because I chose to put on a red shirt in the morning. ;-)
- scotty79 8y agoRead Iain M. Banks. It might be the best SF I've ever read. And I read a lot of SF.
- chimprich 8y agoI agree, but the downside is that you'll be spoilt for most of the rest of the genre, because little else measures up. Perhaps read everything else first. Amazon Prime currently has an adaptation of Consider Phlebas in the pipeline, something I have very mixed feelings about.
- rsynnott 8y agoNot sure why they went for that one, really; even as a novel it's kind of messy and confusing, and I struggle to imagine how an adaptation will work. Player of Games would have been a much more obvious choice.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoI'm torn; it's my least favourite of Culture novels, and I almost consider it an early trial, very different in spirit and nature than the rest; but I can see how it'd be an obvious choice for a movie/series: it has the most action/adventure feel and a simple linear storyline (even if you account for the "twist" of who the good guys / bad guys are). There's a single protagonist, we focus largely on him, and he goes out and has adventures in space. Whereas something like Excession - that can never ever be a movie, really...:-/
- User23 8y agoThere's another view which is that the Culture Minds keep humans around as pets. For those who hold that view, the Culture is actually a dystopia.
- ianai 8y agoSure, but I’ve still seen enough dystopian films/shows. Bird box and skyline are basically the same film, at the start/premise. Don’t look or you’ll die.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mrec 8y agoKim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge (the last in his Orange County trilogy) springs to mind.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoOptimism may be passe in TV and film right now, but there's plenty of those in written sci-fi. Off the top of my head, I recently read John Scalzi's Interdependency series (the two books of it that are out, anyway).
- rsynnott 8y agoThose are about the collapse of civilisation, and it's a pretty nasty civilisation; I'm not sure how optimistic they are.
- burkaman 8y agoImperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke takes place in a generally better future where the solar system has been colonized. I found it incredibly boring, which is maybe your point. Also, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells is about an essentially perfect utopia.
- rsynnott 8y agoAnother example would be Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children series; unlike the rest of his novels, which are generally extremely grim, it takes place in a sort of flawed utopia. A lot of people dislike it for this reason.
- larkeith 8y agoSeveral books and quite a few short stories by Arthur C Clarke are more or less optimistic about the future - definitely not utopian, but better than today.
- KnightOfWords 8y ago> Maybe not surprising, but worth noting anyway just how pessimistic these stories are. That remains to be seen I'm afraid, the long-term carrying capacity of the planet is unknown. The green revolution has allowed us to feed 7 billion+ people but is powered by fossil fuels. The costs are accelerated climate change, soil degradation and aquifer depletion. Feeding the current population for a few decades is one thing, doing so for centuries or millennia quite another.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoWho knew that food wouldn’t be the thing running out, but our free will and privacy? Facebook is made of peeeople! Blade Runner has always got the prediction closest, in my opinion. The future is ruled by corporations.
- bproven 8y agosame in death race 2000! :)
- ghaff 8y agoAlso the original Rollerball.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Who knew that food wouldn’t be the thing running out, but our free will and privacy Arguably Orwell knew this.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoYep he nailed many things so well.
- krapp 8y ago> Funny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong about the consequences. Like a future with interplanetary colonies and sentient robots but no personal computers and definitely no internet. Or an internet, but it's virtual reality, and human consciousness is stored on data tapes.
- Tor3 8y agoAs a boy I read Asimov's "I, Robot" books, and I remember even back then I thought it strange that the robot's programming was stored on paper tape..
- kumarharsh 8y agoI think most of them later had positronic brains, especially in the short stories and Foundation saga.
- Tor3 8y agoAs I recall they all had positronic brains from the beginning, but the factory that created them used programming on paper tape to feed into whatever created the brain pattern. I vaguely remember a plot that was about some school class visiting the factory and a boy managing to fiddle with the paper tape and change the programming.
- cgriswald 8y agoThis is where the reader’s imagination can fill in the gaps. Paper will survive magnetic fields , heat, and rapid changes in temperature that traditional storage won’t. It’s also cheap and disposable. Maybe one or more of these is an issue when trying to cost-effectively get the initial programming into these things. We conveniently don’t really know how they work.
- tartoran 8y agoIf you think through, analog books are like paper tape. It is possible that future robots will be able to browse analog books and "program" themselves
- pjc50 8y ago1966 pre-dates the full and equal legalisation of contraception in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_v._Baird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_v._Baird ; even now reproductive choice is still somewhat in jeopardy and requires constant activism. Tokyo's current population is 37.5 million and the global population is above 7 billion, but the problems are so far not manifesting that badly in the West.
- MR4D 8y agoMakes one wonder how Global Warming will be looked at 50 years from now when they look back at us.