This is rather amusing, in its way:
Dystopian fiction is hot right now, with countless books and movies featuring decadent oligarchs, brutal police states, ecological collapse, and ordinary citizens biting and clawing just to survive. For bestselling author Naomi Klein, all this gloom is a worrying sign....because Naomi Klein apparently has no idea whatsoever that the 1970s was probably the Golden Age of Dystopian fiction, Eco-collapse edition. Including, I might add, a lot of overconfident predictions about global warming that never actually happened. In fact, pretty much none of the things that were worried about then - overpopulation, choking pollution, the loss of every species less hardy than the cockroach, nuclear war, mass famine, running out of oil, running out of water, running out of air, and of course the obligatory dictatorships made up of the authors' least favorite American social groups - didn't actually happen, either. Shoot, even the Soviet Union fell down and went boom just as soon as Ronald Reagan kicked it in the groin. And so disaster will probably be averted here, too. Oh, maybe it won't. Maybe we really are doomed this time. But we've been doomed before; and it's surprising that Naomi Klein won't at least nod to the past confident assertions of disaster. Although it should not surprise me that anyone with as high an opinion of Margaret Atwood - a woman who was spectactularly wrong in predicting future history in The Handmaid's Tale - might be somewhat deficient in other aspects of this particular literary genre. On the other hand, Ms. Klein got me to post something here after two years! So, go her. Via Instapundit. Moe Lane
Now, Mr. Lane, to be fair, there are a LOT of “Real Republicans(TM)” pushing the Dooooom! line out there. Perhaps she’s just been reading some of our sides more excitable blogs…..
Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, Omega Man; and those are just movies.
Oh yeah, how could I forget: Damnation Alley!
Pretty much the entire output of John Brunner, a man so relentlessly depressing that I gave up on him after only one book…
Let me guess: Quicksand? Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up were only mildly depressing compared to that one.
Total Eclipse, actually…available through the Science Fiction Book Club when I was in high school.
“Dystopian Fiction is what leftists turn to to assuage their grief over the failure of leftist leadership”, I remember reading that somewhere. By their definition a world where they aren’t important, where they aren’t in charge has to be horrible. Someone somewhere will be oppressed, the ecosystem will collapse, the zombie apocalypse will happen, Reagan will start a nuclear war, they’re the only ones who really care enough to save the world! The same old BS different century.
We have reader privilege and are reader splainin’.
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I think we can beat the seventies for dystopia.
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My post world atomic war thriller has a cop break the rules to save lives, an otherwise allied nation headed by the love child of Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, and a world oppressed by a critical shortage of mutants and cannibals.
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There is no reason one must only use those elements in stories intended to demoralize the victims of communism.
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Thanks for all the world building tips.
Isn’t it about time for Hanoi Jane to reboot that crappy “China Syndrome” movie? Maybe this time her and all of her pals will actually fall into the hole.
Had a dystopia-fixation been the only problem with ’70s science fiction it might have been merely awful .. add in pyramid power, plant power, psychic power, and a raft of other simply *insane* ideas and .. ugh! (not to mention too many tried to copy Heinlein’s “If this goes on..” without *groking* it)
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Fortunately, I had missed enough of the Silver Age and Golden Age science fiction that I was able to spend the entire decade catching up, and by then cyberpunk – which was just as dystopian but at least semi-believable and with actual *protagonists* …
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It’s not the dystopia that’s the problem, it’s the *stupid*.
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Mew
I’m guessing that dystopian science-fiction is easier to write. Writers want to have the protagonist struggling against something, otherwise people aren’t interested in the story.
Not .. necessarily. There are only a few plots, man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self ..
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It’s quite possible to write man vs. man science fiction without a dystopian vibe – much of the “golden age science fiction” is this, after all.
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It appears to this cat that Moe’s right – writers at the time, and again today, are skewing their world-building based on their own nonsensical fears.
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Mew