Literary and cinematic dystopias aren’t necessarily invented with plausibility in mind. They may be thought experiments, warnings, or just cool settings in which to stage a story.
But which ones strike you as being plausible, if not necessarily likely?
(You can throw in least plausible if you like.)
1984 was largely based on Stalinist Russia, so that seems highly plausible. Even more so during the final years of DDR.
I find Octavia Butler’s Parables dystopia depressingly plausible. I’m actually worried that’s where the country may be headed.
So uh this is going to sound hyperbolic but I don’t mean it to be so. In the 20 years since I’ve read 1984, I’ve now had, you know, real world, grown up jobs in both academic and quasi-corporate* settings. This work experience has come to make 1984 seem much more plausible to me than it seemed when I read it in High School. Just replace firing with execution and I have seen all the doublethink, memory alteration, newspeak, people in charge simply enjoying being in charge, etc, that I care to see in life.
*Hard to explain
Heck, after he visited there, Christopher Hitchens described North Korea as someone trying to “have a go” at 1984.
I’m not sure if Stephenson’s The Diamond Age counts as dystopic, but its world massively fragmented by instant communication and untracable commerce strikes me as plausible. The prenatal bioengineering of Brave New World/Gattaca strikes me as downright inevitable.
Coincidentally, I just read a similar question on Quora. I agree with their answer - Brave New World. In particular, check out the quote therein comparing it to 1984 (briefly excerpted below).
I see very little chance of us becoming a totalitarian world. What do you think is the bigger threat to your privacy - the NSA, or all the stuff you willingly post on Facebook, the emails you willingly allow Google to scan (because, hey, free email!), the “consumer loyalty” programs you join, etc.
Brave New World is plausible in keeping the masses distracted keeps them in line. It’s not a depressing oppression like many dystopias, where everyone is hopeless; people are oppressed but don’t realize it or don’t care because they are content enough.
However, I don’t think that’s exactly feasible without the massive use of drugs. It seems easier to distract people in real life by just getting them upset about the wrong things, instead of them getting upset about how they are being controlled.
I’ll obviously have to say that the most plausible is the movie Brazil. It’s stylized, but it doesn’t feel like it’s in a world radically different from our own.
I have not read the books or seen the movies, but from what I’ve heard, the Divergent series sounds like the least plausible. But I don’t know how much plausibility they were going for there.
The Hunger Games. Not so much the “games” part of it, but the idea of the super-rich living in their walled enclave, while the rest of us live in squalor and toil in fields and factories to feed the bottomless appetites of our job-creating betters.
I was also going to suggest Brazil. 1984 is the perfect model of an oppressive totalitarian dystopia. Brazil, with its bureaucratic incompetence and corruption, is closer to what the reality would be.
I feel like the dystopias portrayed in the current crop of YA book to film franchises (Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, The Giver, etc) are more coming of age metaphors for challenges of young people (fitting in with friends, dealing with authority, finding your purpose) than they are extrapolations of society at large like 1984 or Brave New World.
I would second this. The Parable of the Sower was extremely plausible. Heck, there are many now who think it would be an ideal (not the characters in the book, of course).
We’re about an election away from The Handmaid’s Tale. Toss in a few more years and we’re in the middle of Nehemiah Scudder’s theocracy.
I also think we’re very close to Children of Men (movie, not book). Not the sterility part, but the slow collapsing of governments: life as mostly normal within certain areas where control is maintained, walled-off countries, extreme migrant crises and refuge camps, and large swaths with a mix of mob and military rule.
ROFL! That’s the funniest damn thing I’ve heard all day!
What I wonder is why people think a loss of privacy leads to dystopia? Not that I welcome an end to privacy, but most of the examples you list have not hurt me in the least. Granted, I am a bit circumspect about what I put on Facebook, but otherwise, the most intrusive thing that’s happened to me is targeted ads, which I ignore just as easily as the untargeted ads.
Every year we let global climate change continue unabated brings us one step closer to the world of Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, with its weather refugees in paper clothing and super-tornadoes.
I don’t worry about loss of privacy leading to a dystopia, but I know that ads will get more intrusive and harder to ignore. When Minority Report came out in 2002, it had some stuff in there like ads that talked directly to Tom Cruise and it seemed very sci-fi from the future, but that seems very plausible now.
That reminds me of the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits, which doesn’t seem quite plausible exactly, it’s an exaggerated world, but feels very real. It feels like an exaggeration of a plausible future world.
The science on the effects of climate change on the weather is not settled. Some researchers think it will cause fewer storms than before, but the few we do get will be worse. Honestly, I don’t see one huge storm after another happening. A more likely climate change dystopia is one where food production in much of the Southern Hemisphere becomes very problematic, leading to economic and political instability and multiple ongoing wars for resources, water being among them. This could also cause huge problems in the western US, where a lot of water has to be imported—it’s already causing a lot of problems, of course, but I mean situations where people and businesses are pretty much forced to abandon whole areas because importing water gets too expensive.
Idiocracy.
I’d say “the entire history of you” is even closer.
And to chip in on “1984”, I read it again recently, some 30 years after first doing so and was struck by just how powerful a vision it is. A possible future? I suspect not but I don’t think a 21st century human with a functioning brain can read that book and not be affected by it.