Does anyone here believe that books like 1984, Handmaiden’s Tale or Brave New World could actually be realized in the U.S.? In our lifetimes?
I love dystopian novels and cautionary tales and utopian novels and all that good stuff.
I have a very good hardcore feminist friend and she is convinced that Handmaiden’s Tale is happening NOW as we speak. She told me flat out, “the phrase abortion riots keeps popping into my head. I don’t want to riot, but I will.”
So, I am curious. Does anyone else worry that these kinds of books are honestly coming true? I don’t mean, do you think you see signs of some of the details from the book in play…that is obvious. I mean, do you actually believe one of the scenarios from the book could actually become a reality.
As resilient as the American people are, I think they are also conditioned to being led down paths they are convinced are for their own good. I think we’ve come close to setting foot in a Republic of Gilead a couple of times in recent decades, and the only reason we aren’t is that…
…we’ve been fortunate to have a government and elected officials that are far better and more sincerely devoted to ideals than we’ve given them credit for.
There’s a reason all dystopian novels/movies either or open with a short “present day” montage and fast-forward to a future where things are bleak with no mention of how they got that way or they just skip all that and start in the future.
Have you taken “Tomorrow will be just like today, only more so?” as a personal mantra? You seem to be utterly immune to the idea of change for any reason, even historically validated ones.
I can think of quite a few such novels that go into significant detail on the transformation, either in linear narrative or flashback.
Look at Mad Max and then look at The Road Warrior. How does the world of Mad Max (which is rife with crime, but people still go on vacations to the country and eat ice cream) devolve into The Road Warrior (which is a wasteland populated by S&M bikers and dirt-poor refugees) in the span of a few years? Yes, yes, nuclear bombs and all that. But it doesn’t explain everything. Nor does it explain why pockets of society are most interested in fighting over gas.
Or what about Blade Runner? It takes place in 2019 and through some unexplained catastrophe, the Earth has become a polluted husk. But! Fans cry foul when Deckard escapes to the country at the end of the movie because they believe the whole country should be as dirty as LA. But US population density doesn’t work like that.
1984 – No, since that was really just Stalinisn writ large. You’d have to have the country set up as a totalitarian dictatorship to even begin the process, and the people who might consider something like it are anti-totalitarian in one form or another.
Brave New World – No, since that depended on complete government regulation of birth and eugenics. Eugenics appalls everyone these days.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Not likely. The world shown is really no different from the world under Heinlein’s Nehemiah Scudder. While the religious fundamentalist movement is strong these days, it’s not really in charge and the world shown in the book would not be accepted by fundamentalists.
If we end up with a dystopia, it will take a form that no one has ever thought of; the only version that I can think of as being slightly plausible is that in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. A Berzelius Windrip could possibly arise if factors were right (Windrip was based loosely on Huey Long).
I think that something like Handmaid’s Tale *could *happen on a state-by-state level in the US, but what that means rationally is that people who don’t want to live like that would move away, or organize and work for change.
Otherwise, I sincerely doubt that a Big Brother like government could happen in America. We’re too untrusting of our government getting that much power. I don’t know enough about other countries to say anything about them.
Now, what’s interesting is that even in America we’re not nearly as distrusting of corporations (we’re getting there) and internet connection hubs (thinking about getting there) and so some of *them *might end up as a de-facto Big Brother, but it won’t be like 1984 - it’ll be more like … the movie version of Logan’s Run - everyone happy and entertained and vapid and not thinking about the big issues because why bother?
Even then there would be pockets of abstainers and dissenters - we’re too diverse a country to end up as a monolithic “dystopian” entity in the classic sense - we’re not an **entity **to begin with, and it would take way too much effort to force us into being an entity just for the purposes of control.
I never read “It Can’t Happen Here”. Just looked it up, and it looks interesting.
ETA: Lasciel, there were dissenters in 1984, too. As a matter of fact, there were whole swaths of the population that wasn’t even expected to be ‘a part of the system’, so to speak.
Sorry to double post, but yes, Justin Bailey, I do think that many novels do go into how the changes happened? In Handmaiden’s Tale there are several references to the events that led up to the current condition.
Does that sound like something that is even remotely possible? Contrary to popular belief… no, fuck it… the vast VAST majority of the United States citizenry would be appalled if women were treated this way by the country’s rulers. Regardless of where you fall on the abortion debate, how many people tout the treatment of women as property? A dozen? Maybe two dozen? How could they “take over the country in a coup”?
We’ve discussed THT before in the long-dead SDMB Bookclub and I still stand by my assessment - the only way Gilead occurs is if everybody drops 50% in IQ points.
*This is how women were replaced in the workplace - the army took their jobs of bagging groceries, being bank tellers, selling cars, etc. The first (bagging groceries) was specifically referenced in the book.
Of the three, BNW is the most likely from my POV - a society where everybody drugs themselves to believe that everything is OK? It’s so disturbing to me to think about this that I’m logging off the computer to go watch Game of Thrones…
No, I’m not saying it is possible. I was responding to your comment that the books don’t explain how they got to the dystopian state. The books *do *explain.
The Republic of Gilead occurred because of a systemic drop in birth rates brought about by environmental issues. While the book does mention some events that happened in Offred’s life, it doesn’t go into much detail about how all this actually went down at the national level. Chapter 19 gives more of the overall reasons, but it still doesn’t go into the how’s:
I won’t claim HT is absolutely likely or even possible as writ, but governments and peoples have shifted over far small crises. I think that if female fertility were to fall to some fraction of its present level, women would return to being commodities in many respects. You could look at about 5,000 years of history for examples.
ETA: And no, I’m not stalking you. We end up posting in many of the same threads, and your ability to insist that _____ could never, ever possibly change is something of a hallmark. Your grasp of history seems tenuous and selective, and your resistance to the notion that things in the here and now might change (within a few years, much less within your lifetime) seems to haul out your IMPOSSIBLE stamp.
You know what, you’re right. I do have an IMPOSSIBLE stamp. And I think I wield it fairly. Google is too big to be bought out by any other company barring an ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE uprising within the Google-Plex and the future of The Handmaid’s Tale will never come to pass barring an IMPOSSIBLE collective decision by everyone that women deserve to be property. The US population is 52% female, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime… well ever.
I’m claiming the people who would have to be totalitarian in order to set up a state (the army, business leader, etc.), are dead set against that sort of system.
I know 1984 can happen because it did. I remember it as if it were yesterday: Michael Jackson caught fire, Vanessa Williams showed us a Miss America could look good naked, and a young Joe Piscopo left SNL to thrill us in Johnny Dangerously and a couple episodes of Goof Troop. And is somehow still worth $3 million.
What, this is Cafe Society, not Great Debates, right?
