Post by eala on Dec 29, 2023 14:35:43 GMT
Classic dystopia fiction of the 20th century criticised the Marxist utopia. I suspect many of us read non-fiction, and listen to podcasts that deal with the ills of woke as such. But who is doing 21st century speculative fiction from a conservative standpoint. Speculative looking at what woke/leftist dystopias of the next 50 years would look like were they ever realised?
Speculative fiction takes current trends and imagines what would happen if they continued unchecked, if they grew and mutated.
Are there any novels that imagine near future where
His last laugh was just the beginning.An omnipresent rainbow looms large over an infantilised London where karmic credit scores determine every facet of our lives, and comedy is illegal. In this candy coloured world, folk walk on eggshells for fear of “invalidation”. A chance encounter drags a reluctant grey man into a seedy underworld of laughstitutes, satirists, word criminals and language violence, where he hopes to recover his sense of humour and learn the meaning of absurdity
— Grey Man In A Rainbow Dystopia: A Satirical, Orwellian Short Story Paperback
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Speculative fiction takes current trends and imagines what would happen if they continued unchecked, if they grew and mutated.
Are there any novels that imagine near future where
- Woke social engineering
technological trends (AI, genetic engineering, surveillance) - environmentalist apocalypticism and centralisation;
- falling birth rates/anti-traditional familiy trends
- unchecked immigration
and similar magnified and unchecked.
Of all of them, I suppose the AI has been most imagined, but the other are at least as interesting, and pressing:
Here's a provisional list of novels dealing with such themes, can members recommend other contemporary novels dealing with related themes and maybe add an illustrative quote.
- Woke social engineering
His last laugh was just the beginning.An omnipresent rainbow looms large over an infantilised London where karmic credit scores determine every facet of our lives, and comedy is illegal. In this candy coloured world, folk walk on eggshells for fear of “invalidation”. A chance encounter drags a reluctant grey man into a seedy underworld of laughstitutes, satirists, word criminals and language violence, where he hopes to recover his sense of humour and learn the meaning of absurdity
— Grey Man In A Rainbow Dystopia: A Satirical, Orwellian Short Story Paperback
- 'A little mental handicap radio in his ear ... to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains
— Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron - “they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any ‘pluralist society’—is doomed.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission
<li style="background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After Crake’s star rises and Jimmy’s falls, Crake invites Jimmy to work on a secret project at Crake’s biotech company, RejoovenEssence. And there are actually two secret projects: the first is a drug called BlyssPluss. The pill gives its users uninhibited, limitless sexual desire, masterful sexual prowess, protection against all STDs, and prolonged youth. But it also—unknown to consumers—acts as a permanent contraceptive. The drug is a massive success and sold in every corner of the globe. The second project is a splice of humans and several other animals to create, in Crake’s mind, a perfect race of humans: happy, vegan, shameless, pacifist humanoids, as much in communion with nature as wild animals. These, as we learn, are the Crakers. Margaret Atwoods the handmaid's tale good on the idea how ordinary people can become brutal when norms collapse, but more to the point her Maddadam Trilogy is more interesting on genetic/social engineering of nonhierarchical polyandrous/polygamous rainbow vegans... something Huxley also looked at with sexual fidelity being seen as a perversion.
“According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
