Three times as hilarious. America is more and more secular every day, especially the younger generation.
Now THIS is much more possible. I can see a less-elaborate and less-dramatic version of this happening IRL…if it hasn’t happened already.
Blade Runner seems more and more plausible to me, even if L.A. doesn’t look much like the movie’s version of it on schedule next year. Enslaved humaniform robots, heavy-handed cops, environmental devastation, hypercommercialized sex, a permanent and poor immigrant subclass, and no political leadership worth following - yup, I’m afraid we’re well on the way.
Running Man, for me.
Personally, I fear that the secularism of young people is passive and not underpinned by any real conviction, and therefore would not stand up to strong persuasion. I have experienced this in real life in a few cases.
I hope this remark, being not political, passes mod muster for this thread.
For the OP, I think that beer and circuses is the more likely route than guns and steel. So Brave New World for my money. I can also see Elysium as a possible direction, where the “have” class gets smaller and richer, and everyone else pays for it.
That’s not just future, that’s past and present.
Definitely this.
By setting it near and far into the future and considering the implications of both science fiction ideas and tangible science fact it covers a lot of ground.
It isn’t a coherent world that forms a single dystopian image but I think it nails many of the ways that “technology” plus “society” equals “problem”.
I don’t doubt that some of Charlie Brooker’s ideas will permeate our world and we’ll not really realise it until it has already happened.
Particularly persuasive to me was “The entire history of you” (dealing with people keeping a constant record of movements and activities) and “Nosedive” (the perils of maintaining a high social media profile)
And I don’t think it is a coincidence that “Black Mirror” could be taken as a reference to the screens in “1984”
I’ll still go with the answer I gave back then: The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Multiple environmental disasters (crop failures, etc.) start hitting the world and people start freaking out.
Secularism doesn’t need to be backed by conviction. In fact, it’s the lack of conviction, the understanding that there are things we can’t know and that those things aren’t actually that important to our lives. Since there is exactly zero chance that the US will be taken over by fundamentalists in the near future, it would have to be the next generation driving it, and they won’t.
Handmaid’s Tale. I mean, we literally have women walking down the streets in red capes and bonnets.
Maybe they were being ironic.
Decadent hedonism, like Brave New World,* Fahrenheit 451*, or Logan’s Run. (In each case, the trope for which the story is most famous, is not the most important part of the story.)
from the forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman:
That is what makes it so interesting because you could indeed argue that. I am in the camp that it is.
Dr. McCoy: “Well, that’s the second time man’s been thrown out of paradise.”
Captain James T. Kirk: “No, no, Bones, this time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”
“This Side of Paradise,” Star Trek
Seconding Octavia Butler.
This, with a healthy dose of Brazil, both the movie and the social/criminal structure of the country. The way Machine Elf describes Elysium—I have not seen it—rings true for me as well. Techno-feudalism is the way of the future: a small stupendously wealthy empowered elite, a slightly larger techocrat class to run things, and a gigantic stupefied, segregated proletarian class that votes for all of the above.
I want to give the nod to Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, especially given the upsurge in fascism today.
Oryx and Crake, another Margaret Atwood novel.
I disagree. A dedicated religionist can be relentless and, in the end, persuasive, if you have nothing to answer back except “well, I don’t know.” I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not sanguine.
A major part of Brave New Word that is very unlikely to come about is the determined engineering of worker classes like the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, largely because we have automation to a degree Huxley could not have imagined, so why bother?
The most likely dystopic form in the short term, I expect, is the corporation version as seen in the original Robocop and its sequels. They’ve always been pulling the political strings, they’ll soon be doing so openly and brazenly, to the point where elected officials are just figureheads chosen by popularity contests.
Dudes, I am using this thread to put together my vacation reading list. Is there anything mentioned so far that will ruin my vacation?