No more dystopia!

[beastro]

, futhermore it is the western purchase of the Congo's mineral resources that funded thefactions in the war contributing to it's scale and scope.

But more importantly the critisism of the US is not for indivdual disasters and the body count they have. It's for creating and enforcing a global system of inequality and exploitation. This system doesn't have a body count because it works by extracting by force mass labour from theose it allows no option to not participate.

Yeah, if only no one had bought anything from Africa everyone there would be fine. The problem of resource cruse lays in how things are managed not in a country having something others are will to buy for.

To paraphrase a quote from an African, whose name I forgot "The problem with Africa comes from the fact that Africans aren't not exploited enough, they stand outside the global economy."

That wealth isn't held by humanity as a whole. It's held by a small few and was extracted by the labor of a subjegated majority and the gap between those two groups is growing.

Aww, the wealth gap.

Doesn't mean a thing that the better of everyone as a whole has taken place, it's not equal, it's not FAIR!

Question: Would you rather live in a 1000 square foot house where everyone else?s was 800, or a 1200 square foot house where everyone else?s was 1400?

Both nuclear annihilation and especially global warming can produce something that makes historical references moot.

And what would nuclear war do in your mind?

All that would be accomplished would be to shove everyone back to the living in the 16th century again. A nothing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but nothing apocalyptic, though maybe I have higher standards when it comes to what qualifies as in apocalypse.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Do yourself a favor and go watch some Cowboy Bebop. It has all the trappings of a dystopian universe. Incompetent law enforcement, vicious criminal syndicates, pirates, apocalyptic worlds like Earth, murder, betrayal, warfare, corrupt government, illegal research, megacorporations, poor living conditions, overcrowding, pollution, poverty, etc.

It also happens to be a very uplifting show that has a blast with itself despite the shitty future it presents. Just because something shows the future in a less than perfect light doesn't mean its automatically the shitheap of our successors.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Why is science fiction supposed to be a prediction?

Nobody predicts jedis with lightsabres, or time travelling daleks, or space werewolves fighting an angry drunken mob of aliens.

Now, I'm also sick of dystopias, because there are plenty of very samey ones around. Also sick of the survivalist mentality, getting back to a "purer" form of life that some people like to fantasize about, which is closely linked. The apocalypse wouldn't be fun.

 

[Pink Gregory]

I don't really see why we have to have the 'we can't have this anymore, there's too much of it' binary attitude to fiction, of all things.

And trust me, I tire greatly of pointless cynicism masquerading as incisive insight or whatever the author thinks it is.

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

Does the Wyrm in Werewolf: The Apocalypse count as dystopian? Because I always hated it.

 

[small]

its a bit weird for me growing up in the 80's mid with cyberpunk being an area of interest, looking around todays world and seeing we are behind with implants but all the rest has pretty much come true

 

[Vivi22]

Something that surprises me about how people look at the NSA is that many seem to think it's the CIA of keeping track of things.

All it is is an organization which collects data, that's it. That's literally all they do. Data collecting. If it transmits data and it can be intercepted, it is. Pretty much the only thing they don't collect data for is radio signals, and that's because Canada gives the US all of those by using Alert Station up north.

All they do is collect data and give it to other federal organizations as need be. It's just an automated proses which is neither good nor evil, since it is incapable of being either, yet everyone thinks they're as evil as the CIA.

Data being collected from innocent people without probable cause, without a warrant, and without any oversight is a severe violation of their civil rights, which does make it inherently wrong. Trying to hand wave it as just some simple data collection that's only used if it's useful is ignoring the fact that the US constitution, and centuries of law are supposed to make this exact sort of government behaviour illegal.

If you broke the law so wantonly, they'd toss your ass in jail. If government does it, absolutely nothing happens and they occasionally even have apologists such as yourself trying to tell people it's okay. It's not. That point isn't even up for debate quite frankly.

 

[Vivi22]

1. 1984 and NSA comparisons

1984 isn't about surveillance of public activity. It's about the surveillance of private activity. I could understand the comparisons if the NSA were installing hidden cameras inside everyone's home but they aren't. I cannot even look at the number 1984 without grimacing in preparation for a ridiculous comparison with the NSA.

Intercepting individuals phone calls, texts, emails, etc. where there is most certainly an expectation that only the sender and the receiver are privy to that communication and that no one else should be "listening in," so to speak is surveilling private activity. It's also a gross violation of individual civil rights for a government agency to do so.

Pretending otherwise is either deliberately naive or deliberately dense.

 

[Mikeybb]

While I do have a soft spot for dystopian futures and world ending fiction, I do feel that it can be overdone.
Not just as a genre but within a specific story.

It needs to be subtly done to be at it's best, otherwise it becomes far too difficult to suspend the disbelief in the face of all the grim darkness.

Utopian fiction never appealed to me as much though.

 

[Racecarlock]

I'm just sick of the setting in general. So many zombie apocalypses. So many nuclear apocalypses. And to those saying there are no interesting stories in a utopian society, what about space exploration? Star Trek was pretty good, and hell, have you tried games like wing commander privateer? That was a good game even though it took place in a utopian society. Freelancer was pretty great too.

That's the thing, just because a society is perfect doesn't mean there still can't be any interesting conflicts in it.

 

[Silverbane7]

i think a lot of it comes from the fact that you (the reader or watcher or gamer) can do almost *anything* in such a future.

you can hunt cats for lunch (book of eli)
rape, pillage, murder, eat dog food, run a motorcycle gang or your own city (original mad max films)
many many things you cant realy do here becaesu its bad, against the law ect.

i think thats the alure of this type of future. a stragne form of freedom. to be as bad or as good as you want...
tho personaly, i think we are headed more towards 'soylent green' than mad max or 1984 as a future type...

 

[TheArcaneThinker]

Not all dystopian books are based on country and the reason why they potray nations as evil is due to human nature . You can understand this by reading The Lord of the flies , yes , a dystopian book but not about future but about a group of boys stranded on an island.

 

[Something Amyss]

If fictionalised apocalypses risk creating real apocalypses, does that mean the violent games/media do make us violent and sexist games/media do make us sexist?

thats why Fallout is the only post apocalyptic thing I like....

You like the Fallout series? Wow! Who knew?

<.<

 

[Nieroshai]

Do you know what's also on the rise, especially since the internet? Overly cheerful and sometimes graphic self-insertion fanfiction. Novels about daily life. Children's books. Sickening romance novels. Sci-fi thrillers and spy novels.

Welcome to the Information Age, my friend. Everything is published often.

 

[Terminal Blue]

1. Why does science fiction so frequently portray the developed nations as ruthless, evil and warlike when the opposite is the reality in most cases?

Okay, let's ask a serious question.

What is the difference between the USA and the DRC? What is actually the difference?

Well, the US has 850 times the nominal GDP of the DRC, and 130 times the nominal GDP per capita. The US consumes 1,800 times the amount of oil consumed by the DRC. The average US citizen has double the caloric food intake of someone in the DRC.

For context, the DRC is probably the most resource-rich country on the planet relative to its land area. It has incredible mineral wealth, and yet the people living there see almost none of the proceeds.

Have you considered that maybe the reason the US isn't particularly warlike is because it has already won without needing to fight. The US doesn't need to go to war to get the DRC's shit. It already gets it. The entire planet is based on a financial system in which the top 10% of the world drinks everyone else's milkshake, and on the rare occasion that has been challenged, on the rare occasion there is a serious threat to a resource on which the developed world is dependent, the result has almost inevitably been war.

But generally, the US has no need to go to war because the status quo already gives the US (and other developed countries, I'm not leaving them out) everything they could possibly want, while their counterparts in the developing world are forced to buy guns from said developed countries in order to fight proxy wars over the pitiful scraps left behind.

2. Why does science fiction so frequently portray a negative future, when by all long term global trends of well-being, we are the best we have ever been and are getting better with each passing day (as a whole, humanity is about 50 times wealthier than we were 1000 years ago)?

This is true. It's even true in the context of what I've said above. However, there are serious questions about whether this level of consumption is sustainable. The massive environmental and resource cost of supporting even a small section of the world in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed is already causing damage which is probably going to irreparable, and there is no evidence at this point that the expansion of the developed world is going to bring any respite from those costs. There is enough food producing land on the planet to feed the 10 billion people the world is probably going to end up supporting before population growth caps out. There is not enough food producing land to feed 10 billion Americans, and this is before we factor in the possibility of serious environmental crises.

Short of some magical technological solution to all our problems, which is ultimately what "progressive" science fiction relies upon, people cannot get perpetually richer for ever. There is a big ball of dirt we're all sitting on and it only has limited land, limited resources, limited suitable climates.

Wars cost more than desalination. Wars will never be fought over water when you can make water cheaper than you can make war. Even trying to find a historic war that was specifically about a resource is difficult. The only one I can think of on the spot is Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the 1st Gulf War.

* French & Indian Wars (mostly fur)
* Japan's entry into world war 2 (oil and rubber)
* Opium wars (silk, spices, tea)
* Portuguese invasion of Malacca (spices)
* Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires (mostly precious metals)

 

[stringtheory]

Do yourself a favor and go watch some Cowboy Bebop. It has all the trappings of a dystopian universe. Incompetent law enforcement, vicious criminal syndicates, pirates, apocalyptic worlds like Earth, murder, betrayal, warfare, corrupt government, illegal research, megacorporations, poor living conditions, overcrowding, pollution, poverty, etc.

It also happens to be a very uplifting show that has a blast with itself despite the shitty future it presents. Just because something shows the future in a less than perfect light doesn't mean its automatically the shitheap of our successors.

Another good 'positive look at a shitty world' is Ghost in the Shell, especially Stand Alone Complex. When Section 9 is in the spotlight it's very much 'post-cyberpunk' where the government isn't actually evil, there are good people in it working to help society, even against internal conspiracies. But whenever the camera pans out to show the larger world it get very cyberpunk with huge societal in-equality (but there's still a functioning middle class), government surveillance (used by the heroes for good, which is an interesting look at the concept) and world at large being a mix of good and bad (Europe and Japan are mostly fine, South America is one giant pile of collapsed governments, and one of the three nations that made up the former United States is turning into a classic cyberpunk dystopia).

 

[Shinkicker444]

Where the OP says the states are the most powerful economically, I could be remembering wrong but as of like a year or two ago fifty odd plus of the top one hundred economies in the world were corporations. I'd provide a link, but it's 3:30 am and I'm on my iPad about to go to sleep.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

While I'm not partial to dark and depressing stories, I still find the occasional dystopia story interesting. Also Cyberpunk/PostCyberpunk, though I wonder if it's possible to mix elements of the two...