Conference noted::sf

Excuse me, that movie by George Lucas is "THX-1138" not 1136 as was
mentioned in my previous note.

    The term for this is dystopia.  It's an extrapolation of some
    political or social tendency intended as a warning.  Some are
    very fond of this genre (Kingsley Amis thought it was the main
    purpose of SF, judging from his book "New Maps of Hell"), but
    because everything is distorted to demonstrate a particular
    point, it can wearing.  
    
    It's a popular style, though.  You can pretty much pick an issue
    and find that someone has written a dystopia about it. 
    Overpopulation?  "Stand on Zanzibar".  Eco-collapse?  "No Blade of
    Grass".  Consumerism? "The Merchants of Venus".
    
    Since almost all SF is written in the US or Britain, and since
    these countries have had some hard knocks in the last couple of
    decades, recent SF assumes a rather grim future.  Most SF these
    days has a dystopian cast.  No more bright and gleaming future if
    your country is losing wars or in relative economic decline.  
    
    /jlr

    Well, one would be the movie "Logan's Run" which I believe was based on
    the book "Solvent  Green" or something like that.
    
    There must be any number of post-apoxolyps books out there, but I don't
    know if they would qualify in this catigory.  
    
    Scott

    Try Harry Harrison's Wheelworld series, which I reviewed several years
    ago in this notesfile.
    
    "Brave New World", Aldous Huxley, is perhaps the definitive archetype
    of these stories.
    
    - Max
    

    (Sorry, I see you mentioned "BNW" in the root note. Try instead,
    "Alas, Babylon" by ... hmmm... Pat something-or-other. Pat Frank??
    
    ARRGHH. Senility is so tragic when premature.
    

        <<< Note 979.3 by ANGLIN::KIRKMAN "Big date on September 14" >>>
                              -< Another classic >-

 >   Well, one would be the movie "Logan's Run" which I believe was based on
 >   the book "Solvent  Green" or something like that.
 
    "Logan's Run" was not based on Soylent Green.  Soylent Green was a
    novel written by Harry Harrison and it was made into a movie.  I never
    read the book but the movie was about the future where the world is
    overpopulated to the point where food shortages were apparent.  The
    government tried to solve the world food problem by secretly taking
    people who died and converting them into a food called *soylent green*.
    I remember the movie starred Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson. It
    was the last movie Robinson ever made I think before he died.
    
    "Logan's Run" was an entirely different concept.  I was about a future
    society where people had to be ceremonially killed by the time they
    reach the age 30 in order to keep the population stable. It starred
    Michael York and Jenny Agutter.

    Yes, LOGAN'S RUN was based on a novel of the same title, by
    William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. SOYLENT GREEN was
    based on the novel MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM by Harry Harrison.
    
    re: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
    
    One person of my acquaintance used to put forth the argument that
    Orwell's book wasn't about a dystopia at all, but about a *u*topia
    -- seen through the eyes of a paranoid. The awful thing is...it
    works.
    
    --- jerry

    A Clockwork Orange fit here, too.
    
    K.C.

    Notice that "Brave New World" is a dystopia disguised as a utopia.  Of
    course, the worlds of "1984" and "A Handmaid's Tale" may insist loudly
    that they, too, are utopias, but so many people are miserable in them
    that the disguise is transparent.  The disguise of "Brave New World" is
    thicker, though usually just as apparent.
    
    The whole cyberpunk genre is dystopian, isn't it?
    
    Notice how rare utopias are.  Aldous Huxely's obscure "Island," and
    Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" are about the only examples I can
    think of in 20th-century SF.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    How about Anthem by Ayn Rand?  I haven't read this in a long time, but
    it was kinda scary when I first read it.  Anyone notice that a lot of
    these books are from the days before SF?
    
    Also, John Brunner likes dystopias:
    	The Sheep Look Up
    	Shockwave Rider
    	Stand On Zanzibar
    
    The thing about dystopias is they have to be believable, and the best
    (most frightening) ones are.
    
    Willie

Dystopias only work as negative examples when the readers are repelled 
by the concepts (or charicatures of the concepts, if you will).
"Brave New World" would be a fine place to live if you liked structure,
frequent sex (mandatory or not), consumption patterns that create a lively
economy, and the like.
Religious fundamentalists of the right stripe might take "Handmaid's Tale"
as a handbook and a goal rather than as a cautionary tale.

Would a story about the terraforming of Mars be a grand saga of the
humanization of the solar system or an environmentalist's nightmare?
What about the industrialization of Antarctica or Yellowstone?

- tom]

   >> How about Anthem by Ayn Rand?  I haven't read this in a long time, but
   >> it was kinda scary when I first read it.  Anyone notice that a lot of
   >> these books are from the days before SF?

	When are the days before sf?  H.G.Wells and Whats his name were writing
	sf in the late 1800's and early 1900's.  

Steve

re: .12

>	When are the days before sf?  H.G.Wells and Whats his name were writing
>	sf in the late 1800's and early 1900's.  

When you say 'Whats his name' I guess you mean Jules Verne.

re: .8

I didnt like "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, but yes it would fall
in this category.  I didnt like the movie either.

I just remembered the movie "Brazil" would fall in this category of
*dystopia* type genre.  I always thought of this movie as Monty Python looks
at George Orwell's 1984.  The Star Trek episode "The Return of the ARchons" 
also would probably fit here.

    Well, the days before SF was a genre.  You know, before they started
    calling it SF.
    
    Some of Heinlein's universe is either utopian or dystopian, depending
    on how you look at it.  Friday is a pretty good example of this,
    everyone (who was 'human') had it pretty good.
    
    Willie

Shouldn't the category of Dystopian novels be limited to those where the
society portrayed is the deliberate embodiment of some particular vision
(usually some crackpot's political, social or religious philosophy)?  I
wouldn't consider the Brunner books or cyberpunk genre to fit this, since
they pretty much show societies spinning out of control under the pressure
of forces they are scarcely conscious of (much less purposefully planning
and implementing).  Maybe this category deserves a different name.

_1984_, _Brave New World_, _Messiah_ and _Farnham's Freehold_ would be
more my idea of pure Dystopian works.  A Vision has seized these societies
and gotten them totally under Its control.  I haven't read _The Handmaid's
Tale_, but the movie makes that seem like another good candidate.

								paul

Who wrote _Messiah_ and _Farnham's Freehold_?  I'd be interested in reading
both of these.

ktlam...

How about Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury?

There's a lot of SF that touches this tangentially.  The Stars My
Destination by Alfred Bester (cyberpunk before that was a recognized
genre).  Rebirth (John Wyndham, I think), about the emergence of telepaths
in a society that cast out mutants.  Many others, if you allow stories that
don't exist entirely within the context of a single society being
criticized.  Dune, by Frank Herbert (your choice of dystopias: before, and
after).

Logan's Run was much better as a book than as a movie.  They offed the
oldsters at 21, not 30.  Much more of the society was drawn, and on a
larger canvas.  Pretty powerful stuff for alienated teenagers.

						-- Spencer

re: .16

>Who wrote _Messiah_ and _Farnham's Freehold_?  I'd be interested in reading
>both of these.

_FF_ was Heinlein as .17 says.  _Messiah_ is by Gore Vidal, a thinly veiled
parody on the rise of Christianity in which a young S. California mortician
named John Cave founds a new religion that sees death (and suicide) as being
good (the religion gets taken over by Madison Avenue types who know a good
bandwagon when they see one, the primary baddie being a St. Paul figure).

_Messiah_ is basically about a Dystopia-in-the-making (from the epilogue you
find out that it succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of the original cult
members, who knew J.C. as another human like themselves, not as a god).

More common are Utopia-in-the-making novels, since they give the novelist a
venue for showing how their grand theories could topple the wrong-headed
old belief systems but without having to show how they would make the nuts
and bolts of day-to-day social interaction work.  Heinlein is good at this
form, with _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ and _Stranger in a Strange Land_
being examples.  The _Dune_ series might be considered Herbert's pessimistic
antidote to this type of science fiction (too bad the writing slacked off).

Ursula LeGuin's _The Dispossessed_ is probably the most ambitious effort to
straddle all these forms while maintaining a very up-front ambiguity about
the desirability of the end results.  Coupled with her short story "The Day
Before the Revolution" (about the day that Odo dies), it gives a balanced
perspective on the passions that go into revolutionary movements and the ways
that they can both be perverted and yet still retain some shred of integrity.

								paul

    re:.14
    
    	� Well, the days before SF was a genre.  You know,
    	before they started calling it SF. �
    
    Still wrong. Science Fiction as a distinct genre began in 1926,
    with the publication of the first issue of AMAZING STORIES. Its
    founder Hugo Gernsback called it "scientifiction" then, and had
    actually been publishing stories by that description in MODERN
    ELECTRICS before that. Still, it wasn't long after that that the
    term "science fiction" came into being.
    
    So, in fact, all of the novels that have been brought up here have
    appeared well after science fiction came into being as a genre.
    
    On the other hand, some of the more well-known among them were
    written *outside* the genre. While NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, BRAVE
    NEW WORLD, ANTHEM, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and A HANDMAID'S TALE can
    be considered science fiction, they were not written by their
    authors *as* science fiction.
    
    --- jerry

    Wait a minute here:  in .12 we have
    
>    When are the days before sf?  H.G.Wells and Whats his name were writing
>    sf in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
    
    to which I responded (in .14)
    
    � Well, the days before SF was a genre.  You know,
            before they started calling it SF. �
    
    To which Jerry responds:
    
>    So, in fact, all of the novels that have been brought up here have
>    appeared well after science fiction came into being as a genre.
    
    
 Willie

    re:.21
    
    I don't see the conflict. What's causing your brain to hurt?
    
    Verne wrote in the middle to late 1800s. Wells wrote from the late
    1800s to the early 1900s. They wrote what *we today* think of as
    "science fiction", but to them it was fanciful romance ("romance"
    in the more general sense of fiction, not the specific sense of
    "love stories").
    
    Then Hugo Gernsback founded the *genre* of science fiction in 1926.
    
    All of the dystopian novels discussed in this topic so far were
    published well after 1926, so they were published well after science
    fiction became a genre. But, as I said, some of them, while we may
    categorize them as science fiction, were not written *as* science
    fiction by their authors. By that I mean that the authors didn't
    think of themselves as writing science fiction novels. They were
    simply writing novels, and didn't concern themselves with categorizing
    them as to genre.
    
    --- jerry

  <<< Note 979.18 by STARCH::JSLOVE "J. Spencer Love; 237-2751; SHR1-3/E29" >>>
              -< Where do you draw the lines around this genre? >-

>How about Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury?
    
    This is an excellent choice...I'm surprised I didn't mention it myself
    its' one of my favorite novels, but of course I like most of Bradbury's
    work..  This novel is very dystopian in nature.  A society than has
    banned books because they feel it's subversive.  The people are
    controlled by television or telescreens.  People caught with books are
    arrested and the books burned.  
    
    Somehow I feel Bradbury was prophetic in his writing.  When I hear about 
    TV and how it influences society I can't help but think about
    "Fahrenheit 451."  But fortunately it hasn't gotten to the point where
    our government is using it to control us totally.  But then again I
    heard something very interesting...some university in Connecticutt or
    maybe it was Massachusetts had done a study of people watching TV during 
    the Persian Gulf War.  They had found that the more TV a person
    watched, the more likely that person was to support the war.  Whereas
    people who tended to read more and watched less TV, they were less
    likely to support the war.  Interesting no?  I forget where I read or
    heard this.
    who 
    people today I cant

    I think this is one of the most useful things about science fiction...
    dramatic portrayal of where trends are taking us, so we are moved to
    change those trends taking us straight to hell! There's also an
    implicit optimism in ALL this literature: perhaps conditions aren't
    exactly what we'd prefer, but THE SPECIES ISN'T EXTINCT! WE'RE STILL IN
    THERE PITCHING. And generally, there's a theme that "advances" (either
    technical, social, or some interaction of both) gives us a shot at
    handling the future.
    
    I think that half-a-lifetime of reading SF has given me a wary view of
    the future -- it's a challenge we have to anticipate and prepare for.
    Dystopias are useful that way.
    
    - Hoyt

    re: .11 - terraforming Mars: engineer's dream or environmental nightmare?
    
    There's a good story about this actually - "Green Mars" by Kim
    Stanley Robinson.  It's about a mountain climbing expedition, an
    ascent of Mons Olympus on Mars, the highest mountain in the solar system.
    Even after terraforming, the last part of the ascent has to be
    done in spacesuits.  Martian politics was split into the Red and
    Green factions, who wanted to either keep the planet as it was or
    turn it into another Earth.  The leader of the trip was a leader
    of the Reds.  Well done, as usual with Robinson.
    
    /jlr

    I just rented and saw the video of "The Handmaid's Tale."  A very good
    film and very frightening.  Makes you want to watch out for people like
    Jerry Falwell.  The acting was reasonably good.  I was surprised it
    didn't do better at the box office.  Like most movies made from books
    it left out a lot of detail and there were some changes from the book
    but the gist of the story remained intact.  Overall I enjoyed it.
    Apparently Margaret Atwood is warning of the dangers that could come if
    the reactionary right-wing were to take over.  The feel of the movie
    was very similar to another film I saw.  That movie was "1984." That
    one was actually a remake of a previous one.  This latter "1984"
    starred Richard Burton(it was his last film before he died) and John Hurt. 
    John Hurt was the protagonist.  Also a scary and forboding film.

RE: -.1

Hey, I rented that one this weekend, too!  Thought it dragged in places, and was a little
predictable in others, but generally a good yarn...

The allegorical level that almost went past me was the one just below the obvious
Fallwell/Bakker/Robertson one -

Consider the COmmander and the 'barren' women to represent the disconnected generation who
grew up in the 40s/50s (and then reproduced 70s yuppies?), and the revolutionaries to be
the 60s kids (and THEIR offspring?) -- the dichotomy between tunnel-vision and the need/
desire to 'connect' and to find 'self-awareness' is BRILLIANTLY portrayed...

Good performances as well, and a couple of not-so-obvious plot-twists...

*** out of ****

>    I just rented and saw the video of "The Handmaid's Tale."  A very good
>    film and very frightening.  Makes you want to watch out for people like
>    Jerry Falwell.  The acting was reasonably good.  I was surprised it
>    didn't do better at the box office.  
    
    This movie didn't have the benefit of the publicity that "The Last
    Temptation of Christ" had, or it might have done quite a bit better at
    the box office.  Apparently the Fundamentalists like Falwell didn't
    realize they were being "maligned" by the movie.  See my comment in
    345.14 and my reaction to the novel in 345.10.
    
    --Simon
    
    

    Samuel R. Delany has made a good case in a number of essays that
    "utopian" and "dystopian" works are both foreign to science fiction as
    a genre. Both are didactic and so concerned with debating (current)
    issues that they leave no room for the free play of speculative
    narrative. 
    
    It's true that good science fiction is always about the present, but
    the new world which comments on the present one must have its own
    reality as well. And the best science fiction which treats utopian /
    dystopian issues (such as Delany's own "Triton", or Russ's "And Chaos
    Died") insists on a naturalistic complexity which can no more be
    considered a utopia (or dystopia) than our own society can.
    
    Ray

As I recall (been many a year) "Make Room Make Room" did not have the soylent
green people-into-crackers bit. I think that was a little bit of sensationalism
dreamed up by some Hollywood hack who saw "Bucket of Blood" too many times. It 
was about overpopulation at the turn of the millenium and its effects on 
society. Scarcity of real food was a major theme. Soylent was soybean-lentil, 
the main food staple.

For a singularly depressing vision of the future, there is "The Blue Ice Pilot",
circa 1988, forget the author. The main character is a spaceship pilot who
transports frozen colonists to newly founded colony planets. Problem is, though,
most of these planets use them as conscripts for their wars. In spite of this,
life on Earth is so bad that people still line up out the door for a chance at
something new. The pilot and his copilot spend most of their free time
beating each other to a pulp. When he's back on Earth, he lives with his
wife (?) in part of a school bus in a junkyard, sharing it with another family.
There's a sort of ray of hope in this colony that seems to be modeled on
Jonestown, with a charismatic leader who has this need to dominate the pilot
in physical combat in order to make him see the light. This was a difficult book
to read because you want to hand all the characters a razor blade so they can 
slit their wrists, but it is well-written; otherwise I never would have 
finished it. Not a whole lot happens other than the interpersonal conflicts.

I think dystopias are a lot more common than utopias because it's a lot easier
to see where we might go wrong, or have already, than it is to plan the perfect
society that is truly beneficial to all. Any society is likely to have its
downtrodden. Any advantage that one group has is likely to be at the expense of
another. Throw in normal human greed and jealousy, and any vision of perfection
is likely to degrade toward anarchy or despotism. Our own society might best
be viewed as controlled anarchy (every man for himself, but within rules that
are applied subjectively). Cyberpunk generally tends toward the anarchic, while
"planned" societies a la "1984" and "Brave New World" tend toward the despotic,
since "planned" implies control to maintain adherence to the plan.