Literary futuristic dystopias have the luxury of clearly defining good vs bad and generally ignoring the horrible plight of the have-nots as anything other than plot points or scene setting.
You’d never read a book that was nothing more than the grind of hopelessness, the self-sabotaging myopic stupidity, greed, and hatreds of the masses that get manipulated by politicians.
What the authors do almost always get right is the bottomless greed of the wealthy willing to set the fictional world on fire and destroy, or at best coldly disregard, the lives of those not in their class to further their wealth and power.
I mean, just from looking at History, we should’ve expected that the Dystopia we would get was one were things are shit for most people but we’re constantly fed fables that “actually it’s all good”, “for you it’s going to be fine (trust me)” or that “it’s all the fault of the poor and foreigners” (or all three, in sequence, as things get more undeniably bad).
That said, at least looking back at teenage me, I don’t think that at that age one is worldly or wise enough (and many people never are) to figure out that the most likely way for us to be screwed would involve some grand scale variant of the “one hand in our pockets whilst the other is waving in front of our faces to distract us” strategy.
Literary futuristic dystopias have the luxury of clearly defining good vs bad and generally ignoring the horrible plight of the have-nots as anything other than plot points or scene setting.
You’d never read a book that was nothing more than the grind of hopelessness, the self-sabotaging myopic stupidity, greed, and hatreds of the masses that get manipulated by politicians.
What the authors do almost always get right is the bottomless greed of the wealthy willing to set the fictional world on fire and destroy, or at best coldly disregard, the lives of those not in their class to further their wealth and power.
I mean, just from looking at History, we should’ve expected that the Dystopia we would get was one were things are shit for most people but we’re constantly fed fables that “actually it’s all good”, “for you it’s going to be fine (trust me)” or that “it’s all the fault of the poor and foreigners” (or all three, in sequence, as things get more undeniably bad).
That said, at least looking back at teenage me, I don’t think that at that age one is worldly or wise enough (and many people never are) to figure out that the most likely way for us to be screwed would involve some grand scale variant of the “one hand in our pockets whilst the other is waving in front of our faces to distract us” strategy.