
The Rise of Dystopian Fiction - fern12
https://electricliterature.com/the-rise-of-dystopian-fiction-from-soviet-dissidents-to-70s-paranoia-to-murakami-a73b945c5d37
======
Animats
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)

~~~
kerkeslager
I don't think that we as a species don't know what to try, I just think that a
lot of the things that make a utopia involve wrestling away power and money
from those who have it, and they have enough power and money to prevent that
from happening.

I suspect, though it's hard to prove, that we have the resources to meet the
basic needs of every human on the planet: food, water, and shelter. And I
think most visions of utopia would agree on that as an element.

But what we don't have enough for is everyone's greed. And as resources have
grown, we've watched human greed grow to swallow most of that growth. Many
people believe greed to be an inherent human attribute. So it's no wonder
people have lost hope that human greed will ever be beaten, or that growth
will outstrip greed. So far we've seen little evidence that greed cannot
consume most progress indefinitely.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wish I knew how real greed looks like. I realized that I've never seen or
experienced it in real life - all the people I know are _not_ greedy, so my
only other reference point is descriptions of greed from stories about
morality. I strongly suspect though, that this real greed is a rare thing.

But I 100% with Animats agree that we lack direction. In fact, we got where we
are by being directionless! Or maybe _indirect_ would be a better world. But
the fact still is, most of the things we enjoy today were not designed to be
good or useful. They were designed to _make most money_.

And mind you, I appreciate how awesome the market economy is in automagically
balancing the needs of people with resources available. But we got to the
point where making more money is the primary motivation for _everything_. Not
whether it's useful. Not whether it's high-quality. Only how much can it sell.
And today, we've mastered all the ways to maximize sale value by avoiding
creating useful, high-quality things.

This hurts me, deeply, because it means that in the adult world there isn't
many people to talk with about anything serious. Even the desire is widely
mocked in proffesional circles. "Business is most important". "If it doesn't
focus on business needs, it's bad engineering". Professional growth matters
only in so far as it lets you land a better job. Etc.

For me, a great leap towards utopia would be to somehow relegate the market to
a supporting role, instead of using it as a sole arbiter of what should be
done and how.

~~~
kerkeslager
I think you're missing some very obvious greed in your life. People design
things to make money rather than to be good or useful because of greed. If we
sought to make the world a better place instead of make the most money, we'd
set aside the money and design things to be good and useful.

Of course, some people do that, but those people don't succed in making lots
of money, so we don't hear about them unless we actively seek that information
out.

I suspect that the reason you don't see the greed that motivates so much of
human action around you is that you, like me, are greedy. Time after time I've
chosen jobs that made me money rather than improving the world. It's hard for
me to look at greed in others without seeing the greed in myself.

But if you really want the market relegated to a secondary role, then you want
a way to defeat greed, so that people stop letting greed for the most money
dictate their actions.

------
delegate
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.

~~~
clarkmoody
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
Are these books mandatory reading? Where?

------
roceasta
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
>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.)

~~~
slededit
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
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
You don't need an election to make your own way in life.

~~~
mmirate
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
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
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_ ).

------
divenorth
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
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
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
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.

------
pmontra
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
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.

------
sfRattan
> 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-mis...](http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-
fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125)

[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/)

------
taheca
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?

~~~
tnecniv
Utopian literature has a fundamental problem where there is no
conflict...because it's a Utopia.

The only popular utopian literature I can think of is Star Trek and all of
their plots either involve characters leaving the utopia to explore or
defending it from those who would destroy it.

~~~
dragonwriter
Utopian literature typically uses conflict with a non-utopian society both
because it drives drama/interest and because it provides a context (especially
where the non-utopian society is familiar to the intended audience) for
illustrating the contrast between what is proposed and the status quo.

A classical form of this conflict is the form of the interaction of a member
(or group of members) of the non-utopian society (especially one with a strong
pre-existing bias against the utopian society) thrust into the utopian
society. Typically, the outsider is converted (if single; if there a multiple,
the response is often that most convert, but having a minority of unconvinced
holdouts isn't uncommon.)

Among others _Walden Two_ and _Ecotopia_ use variations of this.

------
qaute
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.

------
qaute
Recent-ish optimistic sci-fi written because of this:
[http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/](http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks, just bought it!

(The "get the book" link on that site says it isn't available, but one can
find it on Amazon.)

------
frandroid
How could they forget Revelations?

~~~
s_kilk
Wouldn't Revelations be Apocalyptic, rather than Dystopian?

------
awkwarddaturtle
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)

