It’s the End of the World as We Know It
Man, apocalypse sells. I’d say that dystopia was all the rage in movies, teevee, and books, but that would be underselling it. There is no other topic. I’m an old hand at it. Long before R.E.M., we had this sort of thing:
Of course everyone tries their hand at the Nostradamus thing, and misses by a mile. It’s comical to watch things like Blade Runner and see how rainy Los Angeles was going to get. Everyone will have umbrellas with lights in the handles, and flying cars, but no one seems to have a cell phone in the future, do they? Deckard’s putting coins in a payphone between flying car rides. In general, the bigger the budget for a movie, the farther off they get from the way things actually turned out. Smarter fictionistas place their space operas a thousand years in the future, so they can keep on with their silly versions of dystopia.
Eric Blair and Aldous Huxley pretty much covered all the ground required. We’d be amused or stomped into submission, one way or the other. Maybe both. They’re old hat, now. The new imaginary dystopias have women being forced to have babies, or men forced to sleep for a hundred years to reach the next interstellar gas station, because there’s no gas on Earth, natch. That’s a hardy perennial.
So the planet will be too hot or too cold, or both, or filled with the undead, or the recently dead, or the ancient dead, doing undead-like things. Reverse vampires will fight lizard people for control over the precious soylent green reserve. Whatever. It’s all kinda tedious.
The reason authors get the future so wrong is because they’re laboring under massive misconceptions about the present. Fruit of the poison tree, as it were. If they truly understood the way the world worked today, and went from there, they might have a shot. But women “forced to have babies” must be an amusing topic for a landlord who accepts Section 8 for their apartments. And the weather never does seem to have the gumption to wipe us all out. There was a wall of ice a mile high not too long ago where I’m typing this from. Weather never does seem to cooperate, coming or going.
Nuclear problems are a fave, of course. We’re all going to glow in the dark anytime now. We were promised atomic cataclysms morning, noon and night since Oppenheimer finally got ahold of Von Neumann on the blower and invented the things, but we ended up with Russians and Ukes riding dirt bikes at each other and using shotguns to shoot drones with hand grenades zip-tied to them. Oh well.
So I’ll put on my thinking cap, and stick my neck out. What’s dystopia going to look like? That’s easy. I don’t need a crystal ball, or even an imagination. I just need to visit a nursing home to ask the last people who can remember the 1950s in the Estados Unidos what life was like back in the day, and go from there:
Then I’ll ask them what a dystopia is gonna look like. I’m sure they’ll answer, unanimously: Dude, you’re living in it:
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