IF YOU have ever watched Black Mirror or The Last of Us – or read the comic book 2000AD, where Judge Dredd was born – you have experienced the joy and horror of dystopian science fiction.
Dystopia is a place where there is no mercy, no beauty and no hope. Its skies are black with pollution and warlords rule the weak with violence and frenetic, high-tech propaganda. Like Thomas More’s Utopia, dystopia is a fantasy place. Yet, over the past decade, many world leaders have treated dystopia as a realistic vision of our future, one we should use as an inspiration for public policies and scientific research.
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Politicians describe immigrants as invaders and argue that we need to build a Game of Thrones-style wall to keep them out. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs publish papers trying to prove that people from one part of the world are less intelligent than others, or that the solution to gun violence is more guns (at least in the US, where I live). It sounds like the plot from a cringey old cult movie. We are basically planning for a future where monsters stalk our cities and we shoot our neighbours to survive.
Recently, I discussed this weird turn of events with Becky Chambers, author of A Psalm for the Wild-Built and the Wayfarers series, at San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation headquarters. Chambers, whose most recent books are about a future without poverty, pointed out dystopian visions are often treated as more “grown up” than hopeful stories. It is as if we are expected to give up hope when we become adults.
As a result, we are left paralysed, unable to imagine a way out of present-day problems because our ruin seems preordained. Or, worse, we continue to do things exactly as we have – extracting fossil fuels from Earth to feed industry, extracting data from innocent humans to feed AI and extracting more “productivity” from workers who are already stretched to their limits. Why not just burn through everything, including ourselves, if the future is doomed to be a blackened pit?
Well, I’ve got some good news for you. We don’t actually live in a magical world where events are preordained. That’s why Chambers writes stories about futures where hopeful signs exist right alongside awful problems. I call this “topian” fiction – storytelling that is set in a place where neither good nor evil rules supreme, and where people struggle with ambiguity the way we do everyday. Without a robust sense of ambiguity, we can’t fix broken systems or maintain systems that will always need improvement. If we can acknowledge that nothing will ever be perfect, it puts us in the right frame of mind to face the future.
Chambers’s work is part of a new wave of “cosy” science fiction that focuses on personal relationships as well as galactic-scale issues. At our talk, she said that we can resist dystopian visions partly by focusing on the small, comforting parts of life. That’s why a major character in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a “tea monk”, a person who bikes around the countryside, accompanied by a nature-loving robot, with the goal of making people really nice cups of tea.
Perhaps, Chambers suggested at our event, if we spent more time recharging and relaxing like this, we would remember there is more to existence than being productive. Maybe humans would be happier in a social system where we were encouraged to take breaks more often, so we would have more energy to put into our work. That is a system we could easily create, and it is a lot less exhausting than our current one.
Another way to break out of the dystopia paradigm is to focus on teamwork and community, rather than looking to an individual leader to rescue us from destruction. Chambers described how all scientific discoveries are actually the result of many people working together, sometimes over several generations. Yet so many of our stories place credit (or blame) on the head of a single person – often a man – and leave everyone else out.
“I don’t have protagonists or villains in my books,” Chambers said, pointing out that both kinds of character are unrealistic. No invention – good or bad – has ever come from one individual’s brain. They always need other people’s ideas. Acknowledging all those contributors would improve the scientific process, and might help with workers’ rights too.
If we want a solid plan for where we are going next, as humans and as a planet, we can’t stuff our minds with endless tales of mass destruction. We also need stories about people who do science collectively, while taking a lot of tea breaks, alongside stories about what it is like to accomplish a few constructive things despite living in civilisations that are often unjust and downright nasty. We need good science and tech, but first we need good inspiration.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan, because I am terrible at arguing.
What I’m watching
Mrs. Davis, a truly silly show about a badass nun fighting an evil AI (see review, page 32).
What I’m working on
Learning more about slime mould genders.
