Author: Moe Lane

Not really one (Branch Point)

Sorry, folks: I did have one to go over - Branch Point by Mona Clee (alt-history written by somebody who was perhaps a little too upset over what happened to Bill Clinton)... but then I realized that the 'why it's relevant' would have been 'because it made Moe waste two bucks at the used book store over a decade ago.' That probably isn't enough.

So let me just cheat and note something (SPOILERS):

...if you go back in time to the 19th century and tell a bunch of RUSSIANS about Hitler, and CONVINCE them, they are not going to wait patiently for seventy years and then buy all of his paintings, thus keeping him out of politics. No... no, the Russians will instead do the practical thing one expects from functional paranoids and simply kill Hitler's grandparents. Although it's hard to say that 'paranoid' is a fair way to describe Russians; they have empirical proof that everybody really is out to get them...

Old RFK ad.

This is not quite a 'real' CfD, but it is kind of interesting: If only to remind folks that doom-mongering has been going on for quite a while. I also have some critical things to say about the short alternate history story "Dispatches from the Revolution" - which is a story that draws heavily on RFK as a change point - but I haven't decided which website to put it on yet.

Old RFK ad.

This is not quite a 'real' CfD, but it is kind of interesting: If only to remind folks that doom-mongering has been going on for quite a while. I also have some critical things to say about the short alternate history story "Dispatches from the Revolution" - which is a story that draws heavily on RFK as a change point - but I haven't decided which website to put it on yet.

Car Wars

Name: Car Wars, by Steve Jackson Games

Type: Board/Roleplaying Game (armored and armed car warfare on the dystopian highways of a future America).

Written in: 1980, to begin with; there have been multiple supplements since.  1996 is the publication date of the latest roleplaying supplement (GURPS Autoduel).

Set in: 2030-2046; I'm doing this one because according to the official timeline Rounds One and Two of Everything Turns To Crap were supposed to have happened by now.

Why it's a dystopia: For our purposes?  Well, at this point the country's supposed to have lost Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana in a civil war; legalized blood sports; watched the environment go Full Metal Ehrlich; and suffered through a decade of domestic terrorism.  And this is the part of the timeline that the future inhabitants are going to be nostalgic about.

Why it's significant: Honestly?  Much as I love this game - and I do, I do - I'm doing it because it's a handy referent to peak oil in popular culture.

What happened?  Well, the environmental estimates were as accurate as they always were - for some reason, radical Greenies really do tend to forget that rich people breathe oxygen, drink water, and metabolize organic material, too - but it's the peak oil thing that is probably the tell, here.

The short version of the peak oil theory: take a commonsense observation (there's a finite amount of oil on the planet), add DOOM, and you end up with peak oil... which is to say, at some point the oil wells run dry, society collapses a la Mad Max, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.  My colleague Steve Maley has a pretty good critique of the theory over at RedState; without getting into that too deeply, suffice it to say that peak oil pretty severely ignores economic factors.  Simply put, the basic theory assumes that increased demand/price, or improved technologies, will almost never be a factor in determining the availability of a particular hydrocarbon supply - including those currently scored as officially 'depleted.'  This assumption, by the way, makes professionals in the petroleum industry laugh like loons.

Some people are probably fuming a little at that laughter, mostly because it implies that radical environmentalists aren't nearly as good at science and engineering as they think that they are.  They certainly aren't good at predictive modeling, as witnessed by the aforementioned lack of violent secessionist movements and general environmental mayhem resulting from all the oil running out in the 1990s.  Remember: this is the Litany of Failure, and it's the Failure of the Greenies.  After all, in 1980 SJG had every reason to think that resource depletion would be a plausible scenario by the mid-Nineties: they were being told so by folks who had what looked to be good academic and scientific credentials.  But those folks turned out to be wrong; and they never said "Sorry about that," either.

IOW: again, what we're doing here is getting it on the record that various doom-and-gloom merchants' track record sucks...

Car Wars

Name: Car Wars, by Steve Jackson Games

Type: Board/Roleplaying Game (armored and armed car warfare on the dystopian highways of a future America).

Written in: 1980, to begin with; there have been multiple supplements since.  1996 is the publication date of the latest roleplaying supplement (GURPS Autoduel).

Set in: 2030-2046; I'm doing this one because according to the official timeline Rounds One and Two of Everything Turns To Crap were supposed to have happened by now.

Why it's a dystopia: For our purposes?  Well, at this point the country's supposed to have lost Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana in a civil war; legalized blood sports; watched the environment go Full Metal Ehrlich; and suffered through a decade of domestic terrorism.  And this is the part of the timeline that the future inhabitants are going to be nostalgic about.

Why it's significant: Honestly?  Much as I love this game - and I do, I do - I'm doing it because it's a handy referent to peak oil in popular culture.

What happened?  Well, the environmental estimates were as accurate as they always were - for some reason, radical Greenies really do tend to forget that rich people breathe oxygen, drink water, and metabolize organic material, too - but it's the peak oil thing that is probably the tell, here.

The short version of the peak oil theory: take a commonsense observation (there's a finite amount of oil on the planet), add DOOM, and you end up with peak oil... which is to say, at some point the oil wells run dry, society collapses a la Mad Max, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.  My colleague Steve Maley has a pretty good critique of the theory over at RedState; without getting into that too deeply, suffice it to say that peak oil pretty severely ignores economic factors.  Simply put, the basic theory assumes that increased demand/price, or improved technologies, will almost never be a factor in determining the availability of a particular hydrocarbon supply - including those currently scored as officially 'depleted.'  This assumption, by the way, makes professionals in the petroleum industry laugh like loons.

Some people are probably fuming a little at that laughter, mostly because it implies that radical environmentalists aren't nearly as good at science and engineering as they think that they are.  They certainly aren't good at predictive modeling, as witnessed by the aforementioned lack of violent secessionist movements and general environmental mayhem resulting from all the oil running out in the 1990s.  Remember: this is the Litany of Failure, and it's the Failure of the Greenies.  After all, in 1980 SJG had every reason to think that resource depletion would be a plausible scenario by the mid-Nineties: they were being told so by folks who had what looked to be good academic and scientific credentials.  But those folks turned out to be wrong; and they never said "Sorry about that," either.

IOW: again, what we're doing here is getting it on the record that various doom-and-gloom merchants' track record sucks...

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

It Can’t Happen Here.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935

Set in: 1936

Why it's a dystopia: Near-bloodless Fascist (Italian-style, not German-style) takeover of the United States of America, followed by a remarkably orderly transition to a totalitarian state.

Why it's significant: Given that it was essentially an agitprop piece reluctantly begging that the American people not reject the New Deal in favor of Huey Long, this book has been surprisingly durable.  In fact, I think that it's second only to 1984 in the field of Overwrought We're All Gonna Get Got By The Man references by the American Left.  Also: Lewis was a good writer (which is an advantage that a lot of these absurd prognostications of DOOM have going for them, by the way).

What happened? Essentially, the American bourgeoisie.

To understand this book, ignore the superficial politics - actually, no, let's address them very quickly.  Sinclair Lewis wasn't exactly a Roosevelt fan; Wikipedia (yeah, I know) suggests that he wrote this book mostly because he was worried about Huey Long going all populist on the New Dealers in the 1936 elections (and whether or not Long was an actual danger to the Republic is beyond the scope of this post).  This book is also very much set in an era where anti-war isolationism was not seen as being completely incompatible with general progressivism, which is why the eventual leader of the American resistance was 1936 Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge, backed up by the LaFolette clan and various and sundry others.  This will no doubt come as a surprise to American Leftists who actually read the book, although probably not as much as the parts where Lewis has his fascist regime be pretty just much as friendly to the Soviet Union as it was to Nazi Germany.

But the real issue here is Lewis's disdain for the aforementioned bourgeoisie, which he more or less simply assumed would look placidly on as a populist movement replicated in six months (and considerably less violence) the success that the Nazis managed only after thirteen years.  To give you an idea of the utter improbability of this scenario: Lewis postulates that it would only take weeks for a country with a functional and stable democratic system to be converted into a police state that would shrug as:

  • Congress was put in jail;
  • The Constitution shredded, unambigiously;
  • Home-grown stormtroopers would be armed and organized from scratch;
  • And Enemies to the regime would be lined up and shot.

...instead of, say, picking up the nearest firearms and start shooting fascists until the local governor could call up their National Guard contingents, who would be able to handle things until the actual military could arrive to take the new President away for his "rest cure.*"  Because that's something that Lewis (and his later, Leftist admirers) never quite got about this country: our successful revolutions spring from middle class sensibilities.  Which is why the various anti-war movements never got anywhere meaningful (it took Watergate to give the progressives the opportunity to murder the South Vietnamese), and the Tea Party did (and does); the former were radicals, and thus unable to inherently tap into the true revolutionary spirit that informed the latter.  Which is, you know, good and everything.  Certainly less violent.

So, basically, it actually can't happen here.  At least, not the way that we had the country organized back then.  Or today, come to think of it.

Moe Lane

*You may safely assume that I am not impressed by Lewis's handwaving away of those details.

It Can’t Happen Here.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935

Set in: 1936

Why it's a dystopia: Near-bloodless Fascist (Italian-style, not German-style) takeover of the United States of America, followed by a remarkably orderly transition to a totalitarian state.

Why it's significant: Given that it was essentially an agitprop piece reluctantly begging that the American people not reject the New Deal in favor of Huey Long, this book has been surprisingly durable.  In fact, I think that it's second only to 1984 in the field of Overwrought We're All Gonna Get Got By The Man references by the American Left.  Also: Lewis was a good writer (which is an advantage that a lot of these absurd prognostications of DOOM have going for them, by the way).

What happened? Essentially, the American bourgeoisie.

To understand this book, ignore the superficial politics - actually, no, let's address them very quickly.  Sinclair Lewis wasn't exactly a Roosevelt fan; Wikipedia (yeah, I know) suggests that he wrote this book mostly because he was worried about Huey Long going all populist on the New Dealers in the 1936 elections (and whether or not Long was an actual danger to the Republic is beyond the scope of this post).  This book is also very much set in an era where anti-war isolationism was not seen as being completely incompatible with general progressivism, which is why the eventual leader of the American resistance was 1936 Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge, backed up by the LaFolette clan and various and sundry others.  This will no doubt come as a surprise to American Leftists who actually read the book, although probably not as much as the parts where Lewis has his fascist regime be pretty just much as friendly to the Soviet Union as it was to Nazi Germany.

But the real issue here is Lewis's disdain for the aforementioned bourgeoisie, which he more or less simply assumed would look placidly on as a populist movement replicated in six months (and considerably less violence) the success that the Nazis managed only after thirteen years.  To give you an idea of the utter improbability of this scenario: Lewis postulates that it would only take weeks for a country with a functional and stable democratic system to be converted into a police state that would shrug as:

  • Congress was put in jail;
  • The Constitution shredded, unambigiously;
  • Home-grown stormtroopers would be armed and organized from scratch;
  • And Enemies to the regime would be lined up and shot.

...instead of, say, picking up the nearest firearms and start shooting fascists until the local governor could call up their National Guard contingents, who would be able to handle things until the actual military could arrive to take the new President away for his "rest cure.*"  Because that's something that Lewis (and his later, Leftist admirers) never quite got about this country: our successful revolutions spring from middle class sensibilities.  Which is why the various anti-war movements never got anywhere meaningful (it took Watergate to give the progressives the opportunity to murder the South Vietnamese), and the Tea Party did (and does); the former were radicals, and thus unable to inherently tap into the true revolutionary spirit that informed the latter.  Which is, you know, good and everything.  Certainly less violent.

So, basically, it actually can't happen here.  At least, not the way that we had the country organized back then.  Or today, come to think of it.

Moe Lane

*You may safely assume that I am not impressed by Lewis's handwaving away of those details.

The Handmaid’s Tale.

Name: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Type: Book

Written in: 1985

Set in: At a guess, probably right about now.  I'm kind of pushing it - 2015 might be a safer date - but what the heck.  Definitely the coup should have happened already.

Why it's a dystopia: Extreme - extreme - gender repression, coupled with all the rigorously accurate and scientific depiction of ecological/nuclear disaster that we've come to expect from liberal arts majors.  A good deal of racism, also (including a soupcon of the usual petulance from the Left that modern Evangelical Christianity has found good, sound, Biblical reasons to avoid anti-Semitism like the plague). Oh, and there's like, heavy infertility and so forth (note the previous sneer about liberal arts majors*).

Why it's significant: It is widely rumored that (at least during the latter 80s/early 90s) proof of possession of this book be demonstrated by any individual seeking a bachelor's degree or higher in Women's Studies.  It also got turned into a movie, which was also apparently required watching.  And, to be fair, on a technical level it's fairly well-written.

What happened? Well, two things, essentially:

  1. Margaret Atwood, while a decent writer, has an untreated case of Canadian's Disease: which is to say, she thinks that she perfectly understands the motivations and drives of every facet of every demographic of every sub-culture found inside the United States of America.  This is normally not much of a problem, per se, except when...
  2. ...a sufferer of Canadian's Disease happens to hate one particular sub-culture anyway.  In this case, popular evangelical Christianity, which is why apparently we were all supposed to have come under the grips by now of a totalitarian group of fanatical Old-Testament social conservative misogynists with a nigh-literal lust for power.  Meanwhile, out in the real world, white evangelical groups instead went off funding AIDS prevention programs in Africa, assisting Christian Chinese against widespread religious-based persecution, and winning elections that unaccountably did not result in theocratic terrorist regimes.

More to the point: every social conservative I know is far too terrified that his wife will figure out that she's far too good for him for him to even think about going for this kind of patriarchy gig.  Seriously.  Once you drill down the damn Religious Right is practically a functional matriarchy**.

Hey.  Look around.  Remember, the point of this site is that this is stuff that was confidently and plausibly (to some people, at least) expected to have happened by now.   And no, it didn't happen because Margaret Atwood or anybody else wrote a book, either.  Margaret Atwood had and has virtually no influence over Evangelical Christianity; its members decided to refrain from a theocratic coup all on their own.

Moe Lane

*I am one, yes.  Which means that I know what I'm talking about then, huh?

**I exaggerate, but then: so did Margaret Atwood.