I would’ve said Brave New World. Although the Quora post needed to clarify - Fordism is their religion. Idiocracy is a comedy, so I don’t take it seriously, but people will often choose comfort over freedom often as in BNW (even though by the book’s point there is little choice).
Snow Crash wasn’t really serious, although when I read it about 8 years ago, even then it seemed dated as it was clear thatthe time period is supposed to be about now. If I were writing speculative fiction, I’d guess a date and then double it.
I don’t think people will start having elf babies, but the quasi-independent corporations and rise of private militaries with little oversight seems apt in Shadowrun. Or for books, take your pick of the many that have inspired the setting.
Also Deus Ex, especially parts of the newest, prequel, one. Some people might take a near-religious opposition to augmentation. Some affluent schools have a pressure to give your kid the “best” tutors, SAT classes, helicoptering skills, etc. and those who don’t can’t keep up. I can see parents wanting to augment the hell out of their kids. I don’t know about the “every conspiracy is true” part, of course.
I don’t disagree with you. I don’t think Facebook leads to a dystopia either. My point was rather that the general eroding of privacy and other rights is more likely to come about because people willingly give them up, not that a totalitarian government takes them away.
I think A Clockwork Orange is the most plausible (what with the way it predicts ending crime through psychological manipulation), but I think the tack future societies take is more likely to be pharmacological than through aversive conditioning. I actually don’t know if it would be all that ‘dystopian’, though. If mass administration of behaviour-alterning drugs, voluntary or mandatory, helps us have a crime-free (or low crime) society, that might actually be worth it.
The GDR during its final years was very far from Stalinist Russia, and even farther away from the fictional 1984. Perhaps not coincidentally, five years ago (and I doubt it’s changed since then) the majority of people living in the former East Germany told pollsters they were better off under the GDR and wished they had it back.
For me, it’s definitely The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. The idea of multiple environmental disasters striking at once seems a lot more plausible to me than the idea that people will be raised in hatcheries, say.
A dystopia where people are kept figuratively fat and happy is more likely than one where there is a boot on everyone’s face so ones like Brave New World or 15 Million Merits would seem to be more likely. The people there would probably not even call it a dystopia if you asked them. In fact with BNW you can make the argument that it is only one from an outside observer’s perspective.
The other type is not impossible. After all, democracies rarely (ever?) die from without; they rot from within and change into something else.
To be honest, I find some real life dystopia’s so implausible (North Korea and the Khmer Rouge) that I hesitate to rule anything out in fiction.
1984 feels very plausible to me. Had WWII ended differently, you could imagine a scenario in which Hitler and Stalin split the Old World between themselves, maintaining a never-ending war just so they don’t have to accept surrender/defeat. The Americas might actually remain free, but no one in the novel is going to know that.
However, one caveat: I very firmly do not believe that the future can be a never-ending boot stomping on a human face. I don’t think any dystopia is sufficiently stable to pull that off for more than we’ve seen them do it in real life. Whether ancient kings or modern dictators, you’re not likely to see strong control wielded for more than a couple hundred years, tops. (For that matter, I don’t think any Utopia could be much more stable either. My never ending scenario is that the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.)
That’s arguably not actually happening in 1984, though. O’Brien says the future will be a boot stamping on a human face, and no doubt he can doublethink maintain that belief despite any counter-evidence (which he can nonetheless doublethink accept), but I’ve always figured the descriptions of London as a decaying city indicate that the totalitarian regime cannot last forever - that it will inevitably lose the means to maintain the infrastructure needed to monitor and control the population and to secure its borders (though we can assume that by tacit agreement, none of the superstates will invade the others even if the resistance level is trivial).
Basically, I gather Orwell shared your concerns and built them into the narrative. What would be permanently lost, though, is history. They were steadily translating Shakespeare into newspeak, for example (or at least they said they were, but who knows if that was a lie), and if they succeeded and burned all unedited copies, then Shakespeare is effectively lost.
John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider has to be mentioned.
A world where information has become absolute king. Privacy is unknown, except for corporations and very privileged individuals. Everyone’s plugged into a massive mainframe with widely-distributed access points (so close, John) (this was written in 1975), has access to loads of information, is paranoid about their own information being so exposed, is worried about others having unfair access to more information, and so forth.
People live a plug-in, disposable lifestyle that has extremely fluidity in employment (people hop between jobs on a whim, and there’s absolutely no loyalty between employers and employees), in personal relationships (okay, not too far-fetched for '75), and even in family (the protagonist is a former rent-a-kid - not for sexual purposes, but just for a couple that wanted a child, just for a while).
The high-paced rate of change has left most people dependent on tranquilizing drugs to deal with everyday life (props to Huxley’s Soma). People are so desperate for someone to actually pay direct attention to them, and so far removed from privacy, that there’s a nationwide illicit emergency phone service consisting of someone who will listen to whatever the caller says and simply respond with, “Only I heard that, I hope it helped.”
There’s no longer any real cohesive national community or identity, and society’s separated into subcults of religion, ethnicity, and class.
Oh, and the protagonist is a gifted phone hacker (75!) who switches digital identities constantly and writes self-propagating programs to spread through the mainframe and facilitate his separation from society.
Obviously it is not entirely plausible but if you watch some street fight videos on Youtube, you quickly realize that many social aspects of Idiocracy are already in effect in some people.
1984 is totally plausible as an anti-homosexual “conversion” method. Torture a gay person until they become straight or at least find sex abhorrent? Sounds extremely likely to me.
Read some books on North Korea. No need to read fiction.
Boot stomping on a human face? Oh boy, got it. Doublethink? Got it. Secure boarders? Mostly. The escape to China is possible, but harrowing at best. Totalitarian regime? Oh yeah. Going on 70 years.
Re-writing history? Yep, at least for the NK’s. The Kim’s have invested heavily in that and have special departments that do just that. Including creating books that are disguised as written by South Koreans expounding on how great the Kim’s are and how horrible life is in SK.
Dystopian society exists. Now. For 26 million North Koreans.
Some parts of Stand On Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider seemed quite prescient, but I thought some bits were a bit silly and unlikely. On the other hand, just about everything from The Sheep Look Up seemed pretty plausible.
