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Now, I grant you Orwell's 1984 is pretty awful. Still, there's at least the hope that some utterly brilliant Party leader or prole will realise that there's more to life than power, and manage to organise a revolt - after all, Big Brother is served by humans.
No, for my money, the worst dystopia is Stirling's world of the Domination of the Draka. Those bastards make IngSoc look like a bun fight, and they genetically engineer their slaves so they cannot dream of revolt, or fight if they did dream. Newspeak, move over - it's possible to invent new words, after all, but you can hardly change your genes.
Anyone else have a favourite dystopia?
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Rand's anti-establishment protagonist was even nastier than the dystopia.
AldousHuxley'sBrave New World: mostly for being the first dystopia in which the citizenry don't even realise their plight, and the extremely rare dissident is sent off to a relatively humane reservation as "primitive" breeding stock "just in case".
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Um, what plight? The citizens of Brave New World have all the luxuries they could ask for, sex on demand, non-harmful drugs, youth until death - it's a teenager's paradise.
Now, I realise you're going to say that adults want something more, but do we really? After all, it's not as though we have a real choice here, and making a virtue of necessity is a strong human trait. If you could choose between having children, and working a four-hour day before partying all night, which would you really go for?
And even if you would choose to have children, I think you would hardly exchange your place as an Alpha of Brave New World for a Prole of 1984. The proles have as many children as they like, meaningful work (as far as they know) and the daily risk of death. Adults, no? But I think rather worse off.
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King of Men - That is your opinion. This is all theoretical, obviously, but in theory, I'd rather have a family and live in very difficult/dangerous conditions. I really doubt I'm alone on this one. I don't even have any children of my own, and I'm still young; I'm fairly sure that most hatrackers who are parents would agree with me that they would rather have a family as well.
Posts: 196 | Registered: Jul 2002
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The post-apocalyptic dystopia in A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller has always been a favorite of mine.
I think the most brilliantly conceived, though, is the one from the movie Brazil because it is so surreal and yet so believable. It's Orwell's 1984 with the added twist that any redemption is really just a figment of the mind. An escape from reality rather than an improvement in reality.
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For women, Handmaid's Tale is a terrible future. It's by Margaret Atwood if you haven't heard of it.
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I agree with all the literary dystopias listed, but cinematically, I have to give credit to The Matrix for being completely shocking and unexpected in the way Neo is awoken.
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I don't like dystopia stories in general, though - because I don't believe it. I don't believe that a dystopia would last long enough to become the norm. I think the ideas of freedom, democracy, equality of man, and individual destiny determination are too ingrained, too well-known to be eliminated completely. Pandora's box has been opened, and while there could be individual societies and dystipias, I don't think any could truly last long enough to erase the memory of history.
Having said all the that, the one that made me the most sick to my stomach, was most believable to me, and hence was most effective was the society in Arslan.
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The Matrix "dystopia" sorta puzzles me. Granted, I don't want the world to be taken over by machines, but given the premise that it has been, do I really CARE that my body is "really" just stored in some vat of goo somewhere and all that I see now is a computer simulation? Compared to the alternative of a subsistance-only life in a grimy techno-cave waiting to be slaughtered or die in battle, I think I'd opt to stay safely in the matrix. Personally, I wouldn't call the world of The Matrix a dystopia. Certainly it's not a utopia either, but to me it is far from a dystopia.
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The Matrix and Brave New World both create dystopias that are only dystopias if you do NOT belong to the society in question, or are somehow unable to fit into it. (In fact, that's part of the point of both stories.)
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote: do I really CARE that my body is "really" just stored in some vat of goo somewhere and all that I see now is a computer simulation?
Maybe because you care about the fact that somebody could un-plug you without your consent, or even knowledge?
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Maybe because you care about the fact that somebody could un-plug you without your consent, or even knowledge?
But this doesn't differ from our own reality. In the Matrix, the robots don't disconnect you on a whim, because they benefit from your life. You can die in this reality or the Matrix's reality through events beyond your control (violence, genetic diseases).
Presumably you die in the Matrix because your body believes you're dead and stops functioning (though I didn't see the last movie so I'm missing some info).
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My favorite dystopia is V for Vendetta. I used to, periodically try and get up a discussion here about it, but nodoby bit.
The dystopia I think most accurately decribes what could and is happening is Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury described a world where comfort became so much more important than quality and where people were almost completely isolated and at the same time, intensely fearful or any meaningful conflict. In this word, books aren't burned because the government is trying to control people's thoughts, but because people don't want to think and beacuse they hate those who do think and who try to get them to think.
The stomache snake = mood "fixing" drugs like anti-derpessants.
Personalized T.V. shows where all conflict is heavily expresssed but completely meaningless and is resolved through nothing at all = Jerry Springer and reality TV shows
impersonal vehicular homicide = road rage
firemen = demogouges, fad pushers, advertisers, etc. who tell you that the world is a simple place, that they'll do that nasty old thinking for you, that "intellectuals" are all bad people or at least weird people, that golf and football and basketball are all "fine games" that you should be concerned about
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You don't have to look to fiction to find a truly awful dystopia. Any prodominately Muslim country or any Communist country qualifies.
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I too really liked ("liked" ) the Brazil dystopia because it didn't seem like some over-powering evil generating from power-hungry indivduals who had taken control of society. It seemed like a society full of people just trying to get through their day, doing what they thought was right and necessary.
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As a woman, I found "The Handmaid's Tale" to be the most chilling dystopia I've ever read, partially because I considered it the most realistic. Back when Pat Robertson was running for president, it seemed to me like we could be just an election or two away from such a situation.
It scared me so much that for a while I always kept a few hundred dollars in cash at home in case they froze my bank account one day and I had to try to escape to Canada.
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quote:The Matrix and Brave New World both create dystopias that are only dystopias if you do NOT belong to the society in question, or are somehow unable to fit into it. (In fact, that's part of the point of both stories.)
Very good. And that's why I think 1984 is the worst because almost the entire population is suffering/can't fit in.
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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quote: I don't believe that a dystopia would last long enough to become the norm.
Oh but they have and they do. Nazi Germany, the USSR for about 70 years, Cambodia, ancient Draconian.
I will agree with you on the level that I think dystopia's are doomed to failure...even if the tyranny lasts several lifetimes, it WILL self destruct eventually. But they cause untold suffering and grief and put humanity back several steps. That's why we must be ever aware of politics and government. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
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Personally, I feel that Brave New World was as close to a utopia as is possible. Not only does soma sound fun, even most of the dissidents are happy. Helmholtz was just glad to have time to work on his book, and Mustapha eventually became a ruler. The problem is not within the society, it was within the unhappy people. Bernard and John were both hypocrites who were not quite good enough at lying to themselves.
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We just like to assume that our world and way of life is the right and best one. Only when viewed from our perspective are these cultures bad. But what is to say our perspective is the right one?
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) the Brazil dystopia because it didn't seem like some over-powering evil generating from power-hungry indivduals who had taken control of society. It seemed like a society full of people just trying to get through their day, doing what they thought was right and necessary.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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