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In Praise of Dystopian Science Fiction
opinion by Peter Tennant
Once upon a time science fiction was a new thing, a young thing, all bright-eyed and
bushy tailed. It offered us 'sensawunda', an hallucinogenic more potent than any to be
found in the drug dealer's dispensary. It told us to forget the less than perfect past
and ignore the far from happy present, because the future was going to be an age of marvels
in which all the world's problems would be solved with a wave of the scientist's magic wand.
But as the millennium draws to a close we know better, we are older and wiser. The future
is here and now, but alas the future is not at all what it was cracked up to be. With the
benefit of hindsight we can see that technology was always a double-edged sword. We cannot
have nuclear energy without the risk of nuclear war, or the Internet without the dangers
of its abuse. Mechanisation has brought not only cheaper goods but pollution and mass
unemployment. Improved medical science has extended human lifespans but for every new
cure there are stronger, more resistant viruses and other ills. It seems as if each advance
in technology brings its own perilous complications, yet still we hurtle ever onward, never
pausing to consider the consequences.
Technology itself is not the problem. The problem, as ever, is human nature. Scientific
knowledge has grown geometrically, rapidly outstripping our ability to use its fruits
responsibly and for the benefit of all. We may be able to split the atom, but emotionally
we are not as far removed as we would like to believe from that apeman in 2001
learning to use a tool for the first time, only now the tools at our conmand are not
stone and wood but computers and telecommunications satellites.
Against such a backdrop science fiction itself has finally come of age. No longer a purveyor
of escapism to spotty adolescents and idle dreamers, the genre is now seen as a branch of
literature with its own special virtues and critical worth. The dystopian note, so long a
minor theme is SF's symphony, has swelled to a crescendo. The modern writer of SF is not an
unabashed publicist for new technology, but someone who invites us to stop and think about
what we are doing to our world and to each other. To warn about the dangers of progress, to
point out the pitfalls that lie ahead, is a task that has never been more vital, more
necessary, especially as it is one that nobody else seems willing to perform in our headlong
flight to make everything bigger and better and cheaper, and to have it all.
If today's SF writer sounds too much like Cassandra prophesying doom, let us remember that
Cassandra was right, and that it is better to read about dystopia now than to live there
tomorrow.
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