Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?
There's Doctorow's "Walkaway".
How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try Iain Banks, though IMO the world-building is better than the plots.
A world where humans have given up free will, all desire and drive, and live out meaningless lives noticed by no one (ffs, the greatest game player of the galaxy was worried he'd be forgotten in TWO YEARS - and he was, except by people who knew him personally!)? I do not think life as a pet of a machine is a happy future for humanity.
I don't really recognise that description of the Culture - they have plenty of freedom (including the freedom to leave the Culture as individuals or groups) and to do practically anything they want (PoG has game players, large scale landscape designers). And there is plenty of desire and passion by the inhabitants of the Culture and they feel the need as individuals to be more "worthy" there is Contact or even Special Circumstances.
What's not to like?
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#53Is anyone else sick of dystopian stuff? I want to read something where... sure, there are problems, but where people are out there doing difficult, adventurous and good things. Something maybe even kind of motivational. Or at best, just nice escapist stories without all the doom and gloom. If I want to read about stressful, bad, evil things, I'll pick up a newspaper.
As what as become my favourite text on science fiction (by Ursula Le Guin) says,
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. (...)
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#54Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?
I think that Ian Banks' "Culture" series is pretty utopian. The AI Minds are clearly in charge, but they generally treat their human pets well, and with respect. There are effectively no limitations on what people can be, do or have. Except perhaps meaning, and that's a major theme. But there is a novella, State of the Art , which features contact between the Culture and 1980s Earth. And that is very dystopian. As ar…
Worth noting that the dystopian part of State of the Art is the Culture's view of Earth!
One detail from the story that I love is the ship Mind's hobby of collecting individual snowflakes from the worlds it visits with a desire to find two identical snowflakes....
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#55"In political science" - they assert this is science. This is how they decide what to test: "In formulating hypotheses, we draw from several theoretical traditions. The majority of our hypotheses flow from the nature of the content shared across dystopian narratives. We take each theoretical tradition in turn." This appears to describe the difference between fact and fantasy: "Scholars in the narrative persuasion tra…
Perspectives on Politics isn't exactly a top-drawer journal. It's the sort of outlet where articles (often more on the philosophical side) end up that lack the scientific rigor necessary for the top-tier journals. Also, FYI, political science has a pretty contentious divide between people who favor a scientific approach and those who prefer a normative/philosophical approach. The two sides basically hate each other.…
I don't like the paper and think it's horribly crude.
But Perspectives on Politics is a good journal.
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try Iain Banks, though IMO the world-building is better than the plots.
A world where humans have given up free will, all desire and drive, and live out meaningless lives noticed by no one (ffs, the greatest game player of the galaxy was worried he'd be forgotten in TWO YEARS - and he was, except by people who knew him personally!)? I do not think life as a pet of a machine is a happy future for humanity.
Pretty much this. Horza Gorbachul was completely correct in his assessment of the Culture.
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people. Languages don't get destroyed by rearing children in isolation so they're left unable to speak. Languages die when their population shifts over to a language with more to offer. (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.) You can go pretty much anywhere rare languages are spoken and hear parents tell you they ho…
I agree with you wholeheartedly until you stated this: > (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.) It all hinges on your use of market : I would have written society . It's extremely telling that nowadays ‘market’ and ‘society’ have become almost synonymous, not because markets have subsumed the role of societies at large, but because monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of…
"monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction"
Now that's a dystopian theme- I presume you mean that a lot of social interactions these days are on technological platforms that are themselves seeking to make a profit (or a at least a return on investment if not an actual operating profit)?
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#58Interesting. "In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions." Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build wo…
> More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. Maybe that's because it's hard to be optimistic about the future starting from now? The worst case is that the environment goes to hell and we die, or the economy crashes and life becomes hell, or killer robots kill us all (at the behest of some state actor or just because they loooove paperclips). The best case is we get humans to not beh…
Honestly, the first part of your response sounds pretty much like the very symptom of the problem discussed here. You presented a very bleak outlook, no doubt informed as much by dystopian fiction (and the culture enjoying it) as it is by rational analysis.
If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This ends up directly contributing to those world problems we're all worried about. Maybe an influx of positive fiction could help change the overall mood towards the idea that the brighter future is both possible and worth fighting for?
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Honestly, everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland". Yes, it's a bit clichéd. But it's also heartwarming, and for me it was the first thing since many years that left me smiling and full of energy. The movie asks some very pointed questions about the state of the world, and covers this very topic: that our obsession with dystopias is forming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that this is a kind of dumb thing to do to ourselves.
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#59> that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly. America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the syst…
> The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.
One thing I notice, apart from all the stuff that outright glorifies militarism and sadism, or makes serious concerns seem ridiculous: even when it's "good guys in a bad situation", even if they end up "winning", so often what's displayed thoroughly and realistically, with great attention to detail is the violence, the abuse, the pain, the mechanisms of control, all the negative stuff... but the hero usually wins via some silly thing that is not realistic, or even just luck.
On average, you often see realistic horrible things, and that's either unsolved altogether, with an unhappy ending -- or it gets solved by means that are not realistic. Like drawing bad things with permanent marker and nice things with water color, then washing the surface with water.. the realistic stuff sticks, the rest fades. At the end of the day, a person got used to seeing more people getting hurt, more arguments resolved with witty one-liners, more people getting murdered -- but they didn't get anything useful for themselves, just some numbing and conditioning, maybe even a bit of fear to take home with them.
I have to think of The Last Days of Sophie Scholl, that movie certainly isn't "happy". I was sad and upset after seeing it. But it still gave me more than it took, if you know what I mean.
Most writers and actors should simply be ashamed, consider manual labor and never speak again. But that's just my actually unpopular, but earnest opinion.
Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people. Languages don't get destroyed by rearing children in isolation so they're left unable to speak. Languages die when their population shifts over to a language with more to offer. (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.) You can go pretty much anywhere rare languages are spoken and hear parents tell you they ho…
I agree with you wholeheartedly until you stated this: > (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.) It all hinges on your use of market : I would have written society . It's extremely telling that nowadays ‘market’ and ‘society’ have become almost synonymous, not because markets have subsumed the role of societies at large, but because monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of…
I think it's more like this: most parents want their children to be better off. The vast majority of people is a couple steps away from poverty, holding themselves afloat only through decades of hard work. Not surprisingly, the core consideration is the child's ability to find a well-paying job.
And if you really think about it, "monetary exchanges" have been "the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction" for a very, very long time now. A part of growing up is the ongoing realization that all the things you believed are done because they're needed are actually incidental, and done primarily to make money. It's a sad state, but not new.