Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near future, and it's raining.
Nothing against LA, but I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. Then I sort of got the idea that the point was to generally make us more humble so that we'd stop creating new technology and thus risking the environment.
Now I think we absolutely need technology to protect the environment. I also wonder what the effect of film-after-film implying how guilty and wicked we are has on the Western psyche. I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engenders despair and nihilism imo.
It's important to distill a sense of agency in children. That they can control at least some aspects of their future. In my opinion one of societies current ailes is that we underestimate the amount of agency individuals have in society.
Underestimated? These "underestimations" seem very accurate to me, and without a 300-million-person hive-mind, I can't imagine anything different. Any single person who isn't a politician, intelligence agent, etc., is meaningless today, and no single cause is capable of rallying enough popular support to have any impact in the first-past-the-post polls.
Well, there aren't any more unsolved problems that aren't touched by politics (n.b. this wasn't the case back when CS was a new field and better algorithms were being discovered left and right), and it's no easier to get into a royal family than to get the right person elected.
With respect I think that's a very myopic view. I don't think one should build their life around "problems" regardless but if you choose to do so there are two revolutions happening simultaneously. Self driving vehicles were Sci Fi just a few years ago, and Bitcoin is changing how we think of currency.
If the SEC performs a particular action, Bitcoin can be deep-sixed, at least domestically, and since the US likes to export its laws (cf. copyright), probably worldwide in time.
Self-driving vehicles' practicality as a mass product, iirc, is currently dependent on not-yet-achieved processor hardware (ops per second, ops per watt, etc.) and battery energy density, without which they have insufficient visual-processing capabilities and range, respectively.
(Yes, those are hardware problems not political problems; still, not being an engineer in either of those fields I've no more agency over them than over political problems.)
Even after that, they will still be dependent on having not too many regulatory bottlenecks (cf. what the FAA has done to avionics for the past few decades) or legally-mandated misfeatures (cf. Cory Doctorow's Car Wars).
I think those stories are actively eroding the fabric of the society. Note that in most dystopian fiction, the society and its institutions are either incompetent or outright evil. People keep reading/watching those stories, and just through availability heuristic, it colors the way they see the world.
To be fair, by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil. I'm not so sure if that piece of the coloring is so inaccurate. By contrast the old ideas of corporate loyalty and blind patriotism seem laughably naive knowing what we know these days.
A lot of Dystopian fiction also celebrates the utopian few, usually of or descended from common people. Sure it might erode trust in large institutions, but a lot of it seems to support the concept that good people do exist and can make a difference.
I don't really see how society would fail to function without religion. OP is claiming that our society relies on false beliefs to function efficiently.
That's as debatable as it gets. I'd say there's a strong argument that societies more aware of the truth, while perhaps being subject to more conflicts, are better off.
If more people are aware of the truth than more people are equipped to act appropriately. And if more people knowing the truth means that societal systems collapse, then maybe we need new, better systems.
By your logic people should be tricked into believing fast food is healthy in order to help prop-up the US economy.
> Theres a very strong tension between true beliefs and beliefs that help people/societies survive.
There is, but I think it's not about the truth value - it's about complexity. The society doesn't need to be told lies; it's just that the raw truth seems beyond what most people can handle.
Maybe it is solvable through education. A big reason why I see people having trouble with reality is that they were never taught to think in systems, and instead try to blame someone.
I wish that were true but I don't think more than perhaps 10% (possibly much less) of the population have the mental horsepower to deal with the raw truth about the moral and historical foundations of their identities.
I'm in the top few percent intellectually but I'm not sure I do either, tbh. Maybe nobody does.
I think it erodes it very much. And while "by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil", I also learned that a lot of times, it's the media that give this perception by misrepresenting their actions/motivations to people.
And as for institutions, it's fun to laugh at them while living in a world almost fully conditioned on the ongoing competence of those institutions.
Writer David Brin talks a lot about this in his article, "Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots", which I'll strongly recommend here.
>Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales.
Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end.
>>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.
>That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
Good point! Makes me think of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables. Must take another look. (If I recall correctly these are moral tales rather than pessimism, however.)
> Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things.
If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are.
Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying to make money; to be famous.
Unconsciously: perhaps trying to project their despair onto the public. By attributing the feeling of despair to an external cause (which they help to create!) they get relief because they don't have to acknowledge and face it internally. Crazy, I know, but ultimately evil is unknowable and it's better not to dig too deep.
> Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end.
That depends heavily on the dystopia. In Perdido Street Station, for example, the characters do create meaningful change, though I can't imagine anyone considering that book uplifting.
I take your point, though, a lot of dystopic fiction does end with no progress. But I think that's not necessarily a statement of the possibility of change: we usually see the dystopia through the eyes of a single character in a short slice of their lives. It's a very American business, quarterly profits way of seeing things, to measure change in a single character's actions and vision. Change can be slower and larger than that.
"Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what kind of technology, made by whom and why, used how and why.
> War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
-- George Orwell
There is no "Western psyche". Only individual people have one, and I for one write dystopian rap lyrics as a way to cleanse myself, to uplift myself -- and it works, too. You cannot polish a turd but you sure can make a shiny painting of it. It changes nothing, especially since in my case I don't much care for an audience, but it changes me. It reminds me to not give in when too many people around me do the opposite. If you are more shocked and depressed by being called an accomplice and tool of murderers than by all the countless people being dead, that's too much sympathy with the aggressor and too little with the victims. Not buying one bit of it, except I would agree that "The West" is not terribly special, just ahead in some respects, and that poor people can be dicks, too. It goes through all strata and all continents, but yeah, I'll just say it: most people aren't good enough, they haven't been given enough or didn't have the freedom to take enough as a child. They are like bonsai trees to the actual tree they should be, and that's why we get the results we get. Too big groups of too little people. And while I can't prevent what people do, but I can change my own habits and think thrice about whom I am loyal to and why. And you know, if everybody did just that, that would be more than enough. IMO one has to decide between the people who are and the people who should be, you can't serve two masters.
> A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
It really depends on what that knowledge and bravery are. I'm thinking of all sorts of action movies that are really just a glorification of fascism winning against "fascism plus $nasty_thing", and essentially just sits on the receptors for non-bullshit without not being bullshit. In contrast, the kind of things that leave me with a bad ending force me to resist, and to develop my own knowledge and bravery. Think "The Wire", for example. Too many happy endings, and you have bubble gum, too little hope, and you have a mouthful of dirt. But still:
> Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
-- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27th 1904
Talking about 1984 and A Brave New World, I think these might have been dystopian in the past, but not now.
Technology (including surveillance technology) was the missing piece and we've closed that gap not long ago, making Oceania and World State a reality.
Now its up to the elected politicians to implement a particular incarnation of one of these novels.
There are more and more places in the world which look and feel like 1984 (or are quickly getting there), while a big chunk of the 'western' world lives in a Brave New World already.
I guess these books are so popular now not because of what might happen to our world in the future, but because of how accurately Orwell and Huxley described the world we live in today.
Perhaps children are forced to read these books in school precisely because it causes them to hate them. That way, they are sure to avoid those books at all costs later in life, when the lessons are more readily received.
How is Brave New World really all that dystopian? If you're highly conservative and think having big families and lots of babies is your life's goal, then sure, BNW is going to seem hellish. But considering today's low birthrates, and the fact that so many children in rich nations are born into poverty, BNW seems to offer a better society in many ways.
Most other dystopian sci-fi predicts a future plagued by wars, violence, a breakdown of the rule of law, extreme unfairness or gap between haves and have-nots, and other factors which generally lead to the majority of the population being downright miserable. 1984 had constant wars and ubiquitous surveillance by the state looking for "thoughtcrime". Elysium had a society where the elites lived in nice orbiting habitats and everyone else lived in squalor on the surface. The Running Man (the movie) had an authoritarian government shooting people in food riots and using a game show to pacify people and keep them from rebelling, with most people starving but a few elites living well (again, similar to 1984--the "outer party" members had decent standards of living but the "proles" didn't).
Honestly, BNW sounds like a step up from today's world: plenty of casual sex (lots of people already do this now), no worries about child-support payments, no kids raised by welfare mothers, kids raised by professionals instead of by asshole parents who disown them at 18 because they didn't turn out the way they wanted (honestly, I think I see one of these every day on /r/personalfinance), no failed marriages (because no one gets married: today's marriage stats show that it's a failure of an institution with less than 50% success rate, and today's singledom stats show that fewer people are even bothering to give it a first try). It's a big departure from traditional society to be sure, but all indications are that the traditional society of the past is no longer working for us.
From the article: "Today, we can define dystopia as 'an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.'" (This definition comes from the OED.) BNW does depict a totalitarian system, but not an environmentally degraded one, nor one where everything is unpleasant or bad. In fact, it isn't even completely totalitarian: people who don't fit in are allowed to opt out, and become "savages", living outside the society. Normal totalitarian systems don't do that: you can't leave, and people who try are usually shot, as became infamous in Berlin during the Cold War. The society of BNW may not seem wonderful to many people today, but to the people living in that fictional society, all indications were that they were quite happy with their lives.
I've always loved Dystopian novels. Even in the late 90's when I was in high school I thought Brave New World and 1984 were awesome. I'm glad the trend is back.
Aside from a good read, I feel that dystopian fiction is an excellent political commentary and an great view into our future. Books that make me think are my favourite.
Super excited about the upcoming Blade Runner movie.
Agreed. I too have always been a fan of the sub-genre.
Except.... I might've been excited for the Blade Runner sequel if I hadn't known Harrison Ford was in it. Had I been blind to that, could go in without knowing, maybe it would be ok.
To me, Blade Runner really improved upon its source material, and the unanswered and heavily hinted at question of "what is Deckard" is one of those improvements. That question made the story MORE like a PKD "question reality" story, and I love it for that reason.
Now that question is apparently answered, or perhaps shown to have never been a real question to begin with. I'll see the movie, because it still looks interesting, but I might just choose to box it into its own space, separate from the movie that spawned it.
Actually nobody who worked on the movie could decide on what Deckard is. The writers originally wanted to make it ambiguous, and Ridley Scott made his opinion known by adding the dream sequence in the directors cut.
There are sequel books, but only the first was written by PKD. He died before the movie came out (although he saw parts of it and gave it his blessing). The sequels were written by a friend of his.
I had the opposite reaction to Blade Runner and thought it cut the most interesting parts from the source material, like Mercerism and the whole weird culture about buying fake animals.
I liked the movie, but the only real similarity to the book is character names.
Also, yes, to me the new Blade Runner is yet another signal that Hollywood is becoming focus tested to death.
A major part of the plot was the discovery of the snake skin scale in the tub. They didn't dive deep into that culture, but it was definitely significant, as Decker visited the creator.
In the novel, Deckard considers that he might be an android; he encounters a man who suspects he's not human, and even encounters an entire fake police force. But he isn't, and the point of the novel would be less effective if he were.
A major theme in the novel is the idea that there's a significant difference between the real and the fake. The major characters are depressed, stuck in a world where almost all animals are fake, and there are even fake humans. In the novel, Rachael and the other androids do not have empathy; she throws his sheep off the roof of his building as revenge. The point of Deckard's mission (unlike the movie) isn't necessarily to show us that androids' lives also matter, it's to contrast the fake humans with the all-to-human Deckard. (This part is something of a gray area since we're only told that the Voigt-Kampff test works.)
But it's also true that the movie doesn't really make sense if Deckard is a replicant. First of all, he would be a pitiful replicant; he barely survives his encounter with them, and has none of their superhuman skills. But that's a technical point. But if he is a replicant, the movie has no arc -- it's the story about a guy who kills some replicants and maybe (we don't know) realizes that he himself is a replicant and has four years to live. It's not clever, and provides no emotional resonance.
But if Deckard is human, then it's a story about a man, trained to kill replicants, who learns the value of life, even if it's not natural life. In the movie, despite the existence of the Voigt-Kampff test, the replicants clearly have empathy -- Roy mourning Pris' death is an example. So Deckard, it can be argued, is a bad guy in the movie; he's killing living beings who were designed to be slaves and have escaped from their masters. And the movie is about how, in his pursuit of the replicants, is himself made to be hunted, and learns what it is like to be like (but not actually be) a replicant.
Thematically, the Deckard-is-human interpretation is much more resonant than the Deckard-is-a-replicant interpretation.
I'd say the movie was more about Roy Batty and his chums falling from Heaven to Earth, Roy meeting their creator and then killing him, and then sparing their tormentor while dying. The "Deckard learns what it is to be hunted" theme doesn't seem to work as he's mostly doing a bunch of hokey detective work, punctuated by fairly evenly matched violence whenever he actually encounters a replicant - to make the theme work you would need to depict him tormenting innocent replicants in the same way Roy would later do to him.
In addition, I don't think the replicants are meant to be without empathy, as much as having a skewed sense of empathy compared to normal humans - Rachel is detected after not distinguishing between eating oysters and boiled dog, for instance.
> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned.
This paragraph is a common misinterpretation. Ray Bradbury wasn't writing about the dangers of government control or censorship... Those things were consequential and not causal. He viewed the 'firemen' depicted in his novel as a side effect of shallow television pervading culture and destroying any interest in books. His book probably has more in common with Huxley than Orwell. Bradbury says as much himself about the theme of Fahrenheit 451 and its misinterpretation:
> Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature...His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point. [1]
On another note, I've long considered the popularity of dystopian stories among teenagers to have an obvious cause: we put them in a suffocating, dystopian hellhole for 7+ hours per day and 5+ days per week. The majority of their lives are spent in an environment where authority is distant, absolute, and often lacking in empathy, and peers are often as dangerous as those authority figures. Paul Graham in particular discusses the dystopian nature of American schooling through the lens of nerds and popularity [2], and there are a few other articles I've read over the years which mention the notion that kids and teens relate to dystopian heroes precisely because of their own daily environment. [3]
Also surprising that the article doesn't mention Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I would place on the level with The Giver in terms of establishing the recent youth focus of dystopian fiction.
I used to like dystopian fiction but now that reality is becoming dystopic I don't feel like reading that genre anymore. I watch/read news (and HN) and I'm done.
Yes. We seek a balance in our fiction, good/boring times demand grit in our fiction and vice versa. This is why I (and many others) are more excited about The Orville than the new Star Trek series, which looks like more torture porn.
Question: Will people tire of Dystopian? Does anyone out there think there is a market for Utopian literature? Speculating how we can fix and improve things?
"Will Farnaby is a cynical journalist shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, a Buddhist paradise where modern science and technology is embraced only insofar as it can improve medicine and nutrition, not for industrialization; drugs are used for enlightenment, not for pacification; and the evils of corporatism are unknown."
"The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world."
Those books exist. Daemon and FreedomTM are one pair of books that might be right up your alley.
The Culture series describes what is arguably the best possible science fiction society to live in. Player of Games is a good introduction to the series, which shows off what the Culture is by taking you, in the shoes of one of its denizens, to a place that's a high contrast.
David Brin always preaches scifi optimism, but I found Existence to be kind of a slog, so I never finished it - I think you'd agree with a lot of his writing, though.
Iain Banks said he wrote The Culture series as a response to the authoritarian military science fiction of the 1960s. While not exactly utopian (The Culture is rather imperialistic), the books show a positive possible future. Banks's writing reminds me a bit of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide.
On further thought, "imperialistic" is not the right word. The Culture doesn't colonize other peoples, but Contact and Special Circumstances are definitely meddlesome.
Utopian literature has a fundamental problem where there is no conflict...because it's a Utopia.
The only popular utopian literature I can think of is Star Trek and all of their plots either involve characters leaving the utopia to explore or defending it from those who would destroy it.
You've really hit on the key point: dystopia is a source of drama in storytelling. It's (at least to me) much more challenging to tell an engaging story set in a utopian world. If anyone has tips for utopian story telling please share...
Utopian literature typically uses conflict with a non-utopian society both because it drives drama/interest and because it provides a context (especially where the non-utopian society is familiar to the intended audience) for illustrating the contrast between what is proposed and the status quo.
A classical form of this conflict is the form of the interaction of a member (or group of members) of the non-utopian society (especially one with a strong pre-existing bias against the utopian society) thrust into the utopian society. Typically, the outsider is converted (if single; if there a multiple, the response is often that most convert, but having a minority of unconvinced holdouts isn't uncommon.)
Among others Walden Two and Ecotopia use variations of this.
I think I'll try to talk about two sub-classes of distopian fiction across any media of presentation (texts, art, AV works, interactive media (games)).
* A happy ending: Things were going wrong, but there's at least one 'right' ending, where things go the way most would agree is positive.
* Only 'bad' endings: There might be a fight, you might even win the battle, but ultimately the war is lost.
I think that the popularity of each of these depends on how hopeful society in general (and the people consuming the works in specific) are about the future.
If we feel like there's no control or only bad routes left then the works with only 'less bad' endings will probably win.
This is very true in SF. It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. If you exclude all the paranormal stuff (werewolves/vampires/zombies/etc), it's even harder.
One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.
Most of the promising ideas from the 1940-1960s have been tried, and most achieved in the US. See the original General Motors Futurama from 1940, which was supposed to be a vision of 1960.[1] This optimism was during the depths of the Great Depression, the next 20 years contained a big war, and yet it all happened. Freeways - did that. Spreading out cities - did that. Tall buildings spaced far apart in open space - tried that, didn't work out well. Most of those goals were achieved at scale.
The 1964 GM Futurama [2] tries to be optimistic, but it totally missed as prediction. Moon bases. Arctic bases. Undersea bases. Roads through jungles built by giant mobile machines. Desalinization plants irrigating the desert. Extreme urban sprawl. "Neither terrain nor distance a deterrent to where men of the city build their homes." None of that got beyond the prototype stage. Nobody quite knew where to go from there.
In the 1970s, SF had an enthusiasm for big space habitats. That went nowhere; lift cost to orbit is just too high.
Today, nobody is even trying very hard to define a better future. (Well, Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but, face it, as real estate, Mars sucks. If you could get to Mars for free right now, it wouldn't be worth developing. Few deserts are, even ones with air.)
> It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book.
I believe that The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry is fundamentally optimistic.[0] It builds on The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which is arguably also optimistic.
For America, we could start by implementing well-tested and proven measures that have been effective across the western world (universal health care, quality education, etc.)
I don't think it has to do with imagining the solutions, but with avoiding the power issues that come when people try to take baby steps at scale, and overcoming the "efficiency holes" where people have found good enough local minima across the economy.
How do you convince people to "dream small" when our instinct is to want to implement our ideas nationally? How do you incentivize people to [hopefully temporarily] decrease efficiency and increases costs in the search of something better?
The part after the hard rain stops was pretty optimistic. The moon blowing up was just a random unexplained thing that humans couldn't do anything about, so it was optimistic in that humanity is capable of surviving just about anything.
The arklet population goes from 1500 to 7 after a civil war. The first thing the mole people do after coming up from underground is kill someone. After the timeskip, the majority of the text is about the cold war between the new factions, resulting in a brief battle.
There is a subplot about a hope for a better future, but after ten thousand years of constant war, the book doesn't produce much evidence that it's even possible.
Also, RE that arklet civil war - what the book clearly shows is that, even in the face of total annihilation of the human race, whatever unity and shared purpose there is, it takes one politician on a power trip to undo all of that and get people to start killing each other.
Seveneves is a very good book, but it's also one of the most depressing ones I've ever read. About the only positive thing it tells about humanity is that the survivors watched videos of people from "old Earth", and based on that, elected not to reinvent social media.
I don't think that we as a species don't know what to try, I just think that a lot of the things that make a utopia involve wrestling away power and money from those who have it, and they have enough power and money to prevent that from happening.
I suspect, though it's hard to prove, that we have the resources to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet: food, water, and shelter. And I think most visions of utopia would agree on that as an element.
But what we don't have enough for is everyone's greed. And as resources have grown, we've watched human greed grow to swallow most of that growth. Many people believe greed to be an inherent human attribute. So it's no wonder people have lost hope that human greed will ever be beaten, or that growth will outstrip greed. So far we've seen little evidence that greed cannot consume most progress indefinitely.
I wish I knew how real greed looks like. I realized that I've never seen or experienced it in real life - all the people I know are not greedy, so my only other reference point is descriptions of greed from stories about morality. I strongly suspect though, that this real greed is a rare thing.
But I 100% with Animats agree that we lack direction. In fact, we got where we are by being directionless! Or maybe indirect would be a better world. But the fact still is, most of the things we enjoy today were not designed to be good or useful. They were designed to make most money.
And mind you, I appreciate how awesome the market economy is in automagically balancing the needs of people with resources available. But we got to the point where making more money is the primary motivation for everything. Not whether it's useful. Not whether it's high-quality. Only how much can it sell. And today, we've mastered all the ways to maximize sale value by avoiding creating useful, high-quality things.
This hurts me, deeply, because it means that in the adult world there isn't many people to talk with about anything serious. Even the desire is widely mocked in proffesional circles. "Business is most important". "If it doesn't focus on business needs, it's bad engineering". Professional growth matters only in so far as it lets you land a better job. Etc.
For me, a great leap towards utopia would be to somehow relegate the market to a supporting role, instead of using it as a sole arbiter of what should be done and how.
I think you're missing some very obvious greed in your life. People design things to make money rather than to be good or useful because of greed. If we sought to make the world a better place instead of make the most money, we'd set aside the money and design things to be good and useful.
Of course, some people do that, but those people don't succed in making lots of money, so we don't hear about them unless we actively seek that information out.
I suspect that the reason you don't see the greed that motivates so much of human action around you is that you, like me, are greedy. Time after time I've chosen jobs that made me money rather than improving the world. It's hard for me to look at greed in others without seeing the greed in myself.
But if you really want the market relegated to a secondary role, then you want a way to defeat greed, so that people stop letting greed for the most money dictate their actions.
One example in the positive column: Robin Sloan has consistently written optimistically about SF, both in Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, and his new novel, Sourdough.
Yes, I know it's Disney. Yes, I know it's naïve. Yes, I know it has been criticized as having a weak plot by people who would prefer depressing shit. But it's also the single most positive thing I've seen made in the past 10 years. It just overflows with hope about the future. So I do strongly recommend watching it.
Check out Freedom™, the sequel to Daemon, by Daniel Suarez.
Daemon is a pretty good (occasionally farfetched) techno-thriller. But the sequel turns it all around and becomes - like nothing else I've read since Starship Troopers - a manifesto for an optimistic revolution.
It was written in 2010 - 7 years ago! - yet it seems completely up-to-date on modern, and emerging, tech. That's an indication of good science fiction. Imagine a mix of 'enabling' technologies: augmented reality, Tor, crypto-currencies, OpenBazaar, SciHub, AI, with the open source hacker ethic. There's enough ambiguity in characters and situations to make the reader think. And so many sections had me nodding appreciatively or hooting with laughter.
I'd love to see a good discussion on HN of the vision and tech in Freedom™.
It's not a new phenomenon in SF, though. From Ursula Le Guin's introduction to Left Hand of Darkness:
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing."
> One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.
I don't think we as a society or even humanity ever shared a vision. Though you may be right, I think it has more to do with our advancing knowledge which is relegating humans to just an animal ( a biological machine ). We used to think we were special. The center of the universe endowed with an eternal soul. Now we know that we aren't the center of solar system let alone the universe. Science has debunked all notions of the "soul" and it's presence in our bodies/organs/etc. And advances in AI is making a mockery of human intelligence in many specific fields ( though not on general level yet ). And recent studies of our brain and consciousness is starting to remove our last "mystery" of ourselves. And as neuroscience advances more, the "special" nature of our "unique" consciousness will probably melt away like our theories about the soul. There is even talk amongst neuroscientists/philosophers/academics/etc that the brain is just a "predictive machine" and that our sense of our "self" may be an illusion.
And of course add to that the growing economic and power disparity between people and the elite and a better understanding of history which is tearing down all the fake facade of american primacy or "western" civilization or even world civilization.
It also doesn't help that china has surpassed the US as the world #1 economy in PPP terms and will surpass the US in nominal terms in a few years.
In other words, our problem is that we are becoming more "aware/knowledgable". As they say, ignorance is bliss.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadNothing against LA, but I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. Then I sort of got the idea that the point was to generally make us more humble so that we'd stop creating new technology and thus risking the environment.
Now I think we absolutely need technology to protect the environment. I also wonder what the effect of film-after-film implying how guilty and wicked we are has on the Western psyche. I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
Only? Why? (Pure curiousity, no judgement.)
Self-driving vehicles' practicality as a mass product, iirc, is currently dependent on not-yet-achieved processor hardware (ops per second, ops per watt, etc.) and battery energy density, without which they have insufficient visual-processing capabilities and range, respectively.
(Yes, those are hardware problems not political problems; still, not being an engineer in either of those fields I've no more agency over them than over political problems.)
Even after that, they will still be dependent on having not too many regulatory bottlenecks (cf. what the FAA has done to avionics for the past few decades) or legally-mandated misfeatures (cf. Cory Doctorow's Car Wars).
A lot of Dystopian fiction also celebrates the utopian few, usually of or descended from common people. Sure it might erode trust in large institutions, but a lot of it seems to support the concept that good people do exist and can make a difference.
I'd not sure it "erodes" so much as "reshapes".
To function, society depends on mass belief in many falsehoods and fictions. Teaching everyone the truth about everything will destroy any society.
Theres a very strong tension between true beliefs and beliefs that help people/societies survive.
If more people are aware of the truth than more people are equipped to act appropriately. And if more people knowing the truth means that societal systems collapse, then maybe we need new, better systems.
By your logic people should be tricked into believing fast food is healthy in order to help prop-up the US economy.
There is, but I think it's not about the truth value - it's about complexity. The society doesn't need to be told lies; it's just that the raw truth seems beyond what most people can handle.
Maybe it is solvable through education. A big reason why I see people having trouble with reality is that they were never taught to think in systems, and instead try to blame someone.
I'm in the top few percent intellectually but I'm not sure I do either, tbh. Maybe nobody does.
And as for institutions, it's fun to laugh at them while living in a world almost fully conditioned on the ongoing competence of those institutions.
Writer David Brin talks a lot about this in his article, "Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots", which I'll strongly recommend here.
http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/idiotplot.html
That's the idea. Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales.
> I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.
That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end.
>>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.
>That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
Good point! Makes me think of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables. Must take another look. (If I recall correctly these are moral tales rather than pessimism, however.)
If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying to make money; to be famous.
Unconsciously: perhaps trying to project their despair onto the public. By attributing the feeling of despair to an external cause (which they help to create!) they get relief because they don't have to acknowledge and face it internally. Crazy, I know, but ultimately evil is unknowable and it's better not to dig too deep.
That depends heavily on the dystopia. In Perdido Street Station, for example, the characters do create meaningful change, though I can't imagine anyone considering that book uplifting.
I take your point, though, a lot of dystopic fiction does end with no progress. But I think that's not necessarily a statement of the possibility of change: we usually see the dystopia through the eyes of a single character in a short slice of their lives. It's a very American business, quarterly profits way of seeing things, to measure change in a single character's actions and vision. Change can be slower and larger than that.
> War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
-- George Orwell
There is no "Western psyche". Only individual people have one, and I for one write dystopian rap lyrics as a way to cleanse myself, to uplift myself -- and it works, too. You cannot polish a turd but you sure can make a shiny painting of it. It changes nothing, especially since in my case I don't much care for an audience, but it changes me. It reminds me to not give in when too many people around me do the opposite. If you are more shocked and depressed by being called an accomplice and tool of murderers than by all the countless people being dead, that's too much sympathy with the aggressor and too little with the victims. Not buying one bit of it, except I would agree that "The West" is not terribly special, just ahead in some respects, and that poor people can be dicks, too. It goes through all strata and all continents, but yeah, I'll just say it: most people aren't good enough, they haven't been given enough or didn't have the freedom to take enough as a child. They are like bonsai trees to the actual tree they should be, and that's why we get the results we get. Too big groups of too little people. And while I can't prevent what people do, but I can change my own habits and think thrice about whom I am loyal to and why. And you know, if everybody did just that, that would be more than enough. IMO one has to decide between the people who are and the people who should be, you can't serve two masters.
> A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.
It really depends on what that knowledge and bravery are. I'm thinking of all sorts of action movies that are really just a glorification of fascism winning against "fascism plus $nasty_thing", and essentially just sits on the receptors for non-bullshit without not being bullshit. In contrast, the kind of things that leave me with a bad ending force me to resist, and to develop my own knowledge and bravery. Think "The Wire", for example. Too many happy endings, and you have bubble gum, too little hope, and you have a mouthful of dirt. But still:
> Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
-- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27th 1904
Technology (including surveillance technology) was the missing piece and we've closed that gap not long ago, making Oceania and World State a reality.
Now its up to the elected politicians to implement a particular incarnation of one of these novels.
There are more and more places in the world which look and feel like 1984 (or are quickly getting there), while a big chunk of the 'western' world lives in a Brave New World already.
I guess these books are so popular now not because of what might happen to our world in the future, but because of how accurately Orwell and Huxley described the world we live in today.
It's a brave new world until you resist, and then it's 1984.
Most other dystopian sci-fi predicts a future plagued by wars, violence, a breakdown of the rule of law, extreme unfairness or gap between haves and have-nots, and other factors which generally lead to the majority of the population being downright miserable. 1984 had constant wars and ubiquitous surveillance by the state looking for "thoughtcrime". Elysium had a society where the elites lived in nice orbiting habitats and everyone else lived in squalor on the surface. The Running Man (the movie) had an authoritarian government shooting people in food riots and using a game show to pacify people and keep them from rebelling, with most people starving but a few elites living well (again, similar to 1984--the "outer party" members had decent standards of living but the "proles" didn't).
Honestly, BNW sounds like a step up from today's world: plenty of casual sex (lots of people already do this now), no worries about child-support payments, no kids raised by welfare mothers, kids raised by professionals instead of by asshole parents who disown them at 18 because they didn't turn out the way they wanted (honestly, I think I see one of these every day on /r/personalfinance), no failed marriages (because no one gets married: today's marriage stats show that it's a failure of an institution with less than 50% success rate, and today's singledom stats show that fewer people are even bothering to give it a first try). It's a big departure from traditional society to be sure, but all indications are that the traditional society of the past is no longer working for us.
From the article: "Today, we can define dystopia as 'an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.'" (This definition comes from the OED.) BNW does depict a totalitarian system, but not an environmentally degraded one, nor one where everything is unpleasant or bad. In fact, it isn't even completely totalitarian: people who don't fit in are allowed to opt out, and become "savages", living outside the society. Normal totalitarian systems don't do that: you can't leave, and people who try are usually shot, as became infamous in Berlin during the Cold War. The society of BNW may not seem wonderful to many people today, but to the people living in that fictional society, all indications were that they were quite happy with their lives.
Aside from a good read, I feel that dystopian fiction is an excellent political commentary and an great view into our future. Books that make me think are my favourite.
Super excited about the upcoming Blade Runner movie.
Except.... I might've been excited for the Blade Runner sequel if I hadn't known Harrison Ford was in it. Had I been blind to that, could go in without knowing, maybe it would be ok.
To me, Blade Runner really improved upon its source material, and the unanswered and heavily hinted at question of "what is Deckard" is one of those improvements. That question made the story MORE like a PKD "question reality" story, and I love it for that reason.
Now that question is apparently answered, or perhaps shown to have never been a real question to begin with. I'll see the movie, because it still looks interesting, but I might just choose to box it into its own space, separate from the movie that spawned it.
Some things shouldn't have sequels.
Is there more than one book? I've only read the first.
There are sequel books, but only the first was written by PKD. He died before the movie came out (although he saw parts of it and gave it his blessing). The sequels were written by a friend of his.
I liked the movie, but the only real similarity to the book is character names.
Also, yes, to me the new Blade Runner is yet another signal that Hollywood is becoming focus tested to death.
A major theme in the novel is the idea that there's a significant difference between the real and the fake. The major characters are depressed, stuck in a world where almost all animals are fake, and there are even fake humans. In the novel, Rachael and the other androids do not have empathy; she throws his sheep off the roof of his building as revenge. The point of Deckard's mission (unlike the movie) isn't necessarily to show us that androids' lives also matter, it's to contrast the fake humans with the all-to-human Deckard. (This part is something of a gray area since we're only told that the Voigt-Kampff test works.)
But it's also true that the movie doesn't really make sense if Deckard is a replicant. First of all, he would be a pitiful replicant; he barely survives his encounter with them, and has none of their superhuman skills. But that's a technical point. But if he is a replicant, the movie has no arc -- it's the story about a guy who kills some replicants and maybe (we don't know) realizes that he himself is a replicant and has four years to live. It's not clever, and provides no emotional resonance.
But if Deckard is human, then it's a story about a man, trained to kill replicants, who learns the value of life, even if it's not natural life. In the movie, despite the existence of the Voigt-Kampff test, the replicants clearly have empathy -- Roy mourning Pris' death is an example. So Deckard, it can be argued, is a bad guy in the movie; he's killing living beings who were designed to be slaves and have escaped from their masters. And the movie is about how, in his pursuit of the replicants, is himself made to be hunted, and learns what it is like to be like (but not actually be) a replicant.
Thematically, the Deckard-is-human interpretation is much more resonant than the Deckard-is-a-replicant interpretation.
In addition, I don't think the replicants are meant to be without empathy, as much as having a skewed sense of empathy compared to normal humans - Rachel is detected after not distinguishing between eating oysters and boiled dog, for instance.
This paragraph is a common misinterpretation. Ray Bradbury wasn't writing about the dangers of government control or censorship... Those things were consequential and not causal. He viewed the 'firemen' depicted in his novel as a side effect of shallow television pervading culture and destroying any interest in books. His book probably has more in common with Huxley than Orwell. Bradbury says as much himself about the theme of Fahrenheit 451 and its misinterpretation:
> Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature...His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point. [1]
On another note, I've long considered the popularity of dystopian stories among teenagers to have an obvious cause: we put them in a suffocating, dystopian hellhole for 7+ hours per day and 5+ days per week. The majority of their lives are spent in an environment where authority is distant, absolute, and often lacking in empathy, and peers are often as dangerous as those authority figures. Paul Graham in particular discusses the dystopian nature of American schooling through the lens of nerds and popularity [2], and there are a few other articles I've read over the years which mention the notion that kids and teens relate to dystopian heroes precisely because of their own daily environment. [3]
Also surprising that the article doesn't mention Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I would place on the level with The Giver in terms of establishing the recent youth focus of dystopian fiction.
[1]: http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis...
[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
[3]: https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/
"Will Farnaby is a cynical journalist shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, a Buddhist paradise where modern science and technology is embraced only insofar as it can improve medicine and nutrition, not for industrialization; drugs are used for enlightenment, not for pacification; and the evils of corporatism are unknown."
"The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world."
https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797
The Culture series describes what is arguably the best possible science fiction society to live in. Player of Games is a good introduction to the series, which shows off what the Culture is by taking you, in the shoes of one of its denizens, to a place that's a high contrast.
David Brin always preaches scifi optimism, but I found Existence to be kind of a slog, so I never finished it - I think you'd agree with a lot of his writing, though.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Game...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence
The only popular utopian literature I can think of is Star Trek and all of their plots either involve characters leaving the utopia to explore or defending it from those who would destroy it.
A classical form of this conflict is the form of the interaction of a member (or group of members) of the non-utopian society (especially one with a strong pre-existing bias against the utopian society) thrust into the utopian society. Typically, the outsider is converted (if single; if there a multiple, the response is often that most convert, but having a minority of unconvinced holdouts isn't uncommon.)
Among others Walden Two and Ecotopia use variations of this.
* A happy ending: Things were going wrong, but there's at least one 'right' ending, where things go the way most would agree is positive.
* Only 'bad' endings: There might be a fight, you might even win the battle, but ultimately the war is lost.
I think that the popularity of each of these depends on how hopeful society in general (and the people consuming the works in specific) are about the future.
If we feel like there's no control or only bad routes left then the works with only 'less bad' endings will probably win.
One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.
Most of the promising ideas from the 1940-1960s have been tried, and most achieved in the US. See the original General Motors Futurama from 1940, which was supposed to be a vision of 1960.[1] This optimism was during the depths of the Great Depression, the next 20 years contained a big war, and yet it all happened. Freeways - did that. Spreading out cities - did that. Tall buildings spaced far apart in open space - tried that, didn't work out well. Most of those goals were achieved at scale.
The 1964 GM Futurama [2] tries to be optimistic, but it totally missed as prediction. Moon bases. Arctic bases. Undersea bases. Roads through jungles built by giant mobile machines. Desalinization plants irrigating the desert. Extreme urban sprawl. "Neither terrain nor distance a deterrent to where men of the city build their homes." None of that got beyond the prototype stage. Nobody quite knew where to go from there.
In the 1970s, SF had an enthusiasm for big space habitats. That went nowhere; lift cost to orbit is just too high.
Today, nobody is even trying very hard to define a better future. (Well, Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but, face it, as real estate, Mars sucks. If you could get to Mars for free right now, it wouldn't be worth developing. Few deserts are, even ones with air.)
[1] https://youtu.be/tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk
I believe that The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry is fundamentally optimistic.[0] It builds on The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which is arguably also optimistic.
0) http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf
For America, we could start by implementing well-tested and proven measures that have been effective across the western world (universal health care, quality education, etc.)
How do you convince people to "dream small" when our instinct is to want to implement our ideas nationally? How do you incentivize people to [hopefully temporarily] decrease efficiency and increases costs in the search of something better?
The arklet population goes from 1500 to 7 after a civil war. The first thing the mole people do after coming up from underground is kill someone. After the timeskip, the majority of the text is about the cold war between the new factions, resulting in a brief battle.
There is a subplot about a hope for a better future, but after ten thousand years of constant war, the book doesn't produce much evidence that it's even possible.
Also, RE that arklet civil war - what the book clearly shows is that, even in the face of total annihilation of the human race, whatever unity and shared purpose there is, it takes one politician on a power trip to undo all of that and get people to start killing each other.
Seveneves is a very good book, but it's also one of the most depressing ones I've ever read. About the only positive thing it tells about humanity is that the survivors watched videos of people from "old Earth", and based on that, elected not to reinvent social media.
I suspect, though it's hard to prove, that we have the resources to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet: food, water, and shelter. And I think most visions of utopia would agree on that as an element.
But what we don't have enough for is everyone's greed. And as resources have grown, we've watched human greed grow to swallow most of that growth. Many people believe greed to be an inherent human attribute. So it's no wonder people have lost hope that human greed will ever be beaten, or that growth will outstrip greed. So far we've seen little evidence that greed cannot consume most progress indefinitely.
But I 100% with Animats agree that we lack direction. In fact, we got where we are by being directionless! Or maybe indirect would be a better world. But the fact still is, most of the things we enjoy today were not designed to be good or useful. They were designed to make most money.
And mind you, I appreciate how awesome the market economy is in automagically balancing the needs of people with resources available. But we got to the point where making more money is the primary motivation for everything. Not whether it's useful. Not whether it's high-quality. Only how much can it sell. And today, we've mastered all the ways to maximize sale value by avoiding creating useful, high-quality things.
This hurts me, deeply, because it means that in the adult world there isn't many people to talk with about anything serious. Even the desire is widely mocked in proffesional circles. "Business is most important". "If it doesn't focus on business needs, it's bad engineering". Professional growth matters only in so far as it lets you land a better job. Etc.
For me, a great leap towards utopia would be to somehow relegate the market to a supporting role, instead of using it as a sole arbiter of what should be done and how.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar...
Of course, some people do that, but those people don't succed in making lots of money, so we don't hear about them unless we actively seek that information out.
I suspect that the reason you don't see the greed that motivates so much of human action around you is that you, like me, are greedy. Time after time I've chosen jobs that made me money rather than improving the world. It's hard for me to look at greed in others without seeing the greed in myself.
But if you really want the market relegated to a secondary role, then you want a way to defeat greed, so that people stop letting greed for the most money dictate their actions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadacre_City
[1] http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/broadacre-city-frank-lloyd-wr...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964418/ - Tomorrowland.
Yes, I know it's Disney. Yes, I know it's naïve. Yes, I know it has been criticized as having a weak plot by people who would prefer depressing shit. But it's also the single most positive thing I've seen made in the past 10 years. It just overflows with hope about the future. So I do strongly recommend watching it.
Daemon is a pretty good (occasionally farfetched) techno-thriller. But the sequel turns it all around and becomes - like nothing else I've read since Starship Troopers - a manifesto for an optimistic revolution.
It was written in 2010 - 7 years ago! - yet it seems completely up-to-date on modern, and emerging, tech. That's an indication of good science fiction. Imagine a mix of 'enabling' technologies: augmented reality, Tor, crypto-currencies, OpenBazaar, SciHub, AI, with the open source hacker ethic. There's enough ambiguity in characters and situations to make the reader think. And so many sections had me nodding appreciatively or hooting with laughter.
I'd love to see a good discussion on HN of the vision and tech in Freedom™.
The big thing that dates them is that Facebook and Microsoft, and maybe HTC, are poised to dominate VR/AR.
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing."
http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html
I don't think we as a society or even humanity ever shared a vision. Though you may be right, I think it has more to do with our advancing knowledge which is relegating humans to just an animal ( a biological machine ). We used to think we were special. The center of the universe endowed with an eternal soul. Now we know that we aren't the center of solar system let alone the universe. Science has debunked all notions of the "soul" and it's presence in our bodies/organs/etc. And advances in AI is making a mockery of human intelligence in many specific fields ( though not on general level yet ). And recent studies of our brain and consciousness is starting to remove our last "mystery" of ourselves. And as neuroscience advances more, the "special" nature of our "unique" consciousness will probably melt away like our theories about the soul. There is even talk amongst neuroscientists/philosophers/academics/etc that the brain is just a "predictive machine" and that our sense of our "self" may be an illusion.
And of course add to that the growing economic and power disparity between people and the elite and a better understanding of history which is tearing down all the fake facade of american primacy or "western" civilization or even world civilization.
It also doesn't help that china has surpassed the US as the world #1 economy in PPP terms and will surpass the US in nominal terms in a few years.
In other words, our problem is that we are becoming more "aware/knowledgable". As they say, ignorance is bliss.
.... seriously? The American Dream.
(The "get the book" link on that site says it isn't available, but one can find it on Amazon.)
"Sperm Count Dropping in Western World"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796