Dystopian fiction is just too darned optimistic
A tale of apocalyptic impatience
Ever notice that dystopian sci-fi tends to have the world going to hell prematurely?
I recently finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Phillip K. Dick novel that inspired the Blade Runner films.
The novel’s protagonist is a bounty hunter who works out of the San Francisco PD. Rick Deckard’s grim job is to “retire” — kill — artificially intelligent androids that have gone rogue. Created for service and hard labor, the androids (redubbed “replicants” in the films) are not allowed on planet Earth, only on our colonies on Mars. That’s where most of the surviving natural humans now reside because of the nuclear wars that killed so many living things that owning a real squirrel or sheep, as opposed to a robotic copy, is now a prized possession and status symbol.
Deckard zooms around the dust-choked city by the dead bay in a “hovercar,” tracking down escaped androids and blasting them to smithereens.
Dick’s novel, published in 1968, envisioned all this having happened — the wars, the flying cars, the organic androids — by the year 1992. We weren’t quite there, obviously.
Sometime in the ’90s, after Dick’s death, the publisher updated the setting year to 2021. We’re still not there.
Sure, we may have that apocalyptic nuke-off before this year’s up, depending on how far Russia’s Vladimir Putin will go if he’s cornered and humiliated. But if we’re just getting around to rich guys paying $55 million apiece for rocket ride to the International Space Station, we’re not going to be farming oranges on the red planet anytime soon. Likewise, no aero-Audis or androids you can’t tell from your Aunt Jessica and cousin Jalen anytime soon. Well, none that I’ve seen.
Electric Sheep is hardly the only dystopian novel to be miscalculated time-wise.
Margaret Atwood set A Handmaid’s Tale, her 1985 vision of a religious totalitarianism and reproductive slavery, in the year 2005. It’s 17 years later in the real world, and while we are worrying about what a conservative-packed Supreme Court is going to do about Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to imagine Marjorie Taylor Greene, let alone Liz Cheney or Beyonce, going along with pushing women’s rights back to the 1500s.
T.C. Boyle’s Friend of the Earth jibes with our reality more than most. Published in 2000, it imagines a climate-changed world of freakishly unpredictable weather, mass extinctions, famine and continued stupidity. Its futurist sections are set in 2025. Every time I see an evening news report of raging wildfires or another “historic” flood or monster tornadoes devasting whole towns in Iowa and Alabama, Boyle’s name pops into my head faster than thoughts and prayers can.
Still, his apocalypse is already a fait accompli in 2025. We’re three years shy of that. We could still make some smarter choices.
Others? Well, there’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, perhaps the bleakest of the bleak, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival and a world with not much life left beyond cannibalistic humans and fungi. McCarthy is vague about the time frame, which is smart — dodges credibility problems down the, uh, road.
And what about 1984? “Doublespeak” was prescient, but we’re almost 40 years past Orwell’s titular time frame, and even his role model, the Soviet Union, isn’t practicing that kind of grey totalitarianism anymore. The Soviet bloc no longer exists, and Russia still had Starbuck’s and McDonald’s until just a month ago.
All this said, I will readily concede that much dystopian fiction is perhaps intended to be metaphorical or speculative rather than prognosticative. It’s extrapolating what we fear now into something worse.
What I don’t understand about dystopian fiction — and this goes for the “doom porn” that some of Medium’s most followed contributors write — is why it’s so popular.
Or is it, really? Maybe that’s a misconception, too, the fantasy of a malcontent minority.
