Fantastic Metropolis

However, many with limited reading experience of dystopia mistakenly conclude that such dire scenarios must somehow constitute predictions of what tomorrow will be like, or, worse yet, the author’s sordid dream of a better world, and immediately dismiss them as being “difficult” or “too negative.” I know I’ve heard them complain. Where are the desires Marco Polo speaks of, then? they would ask.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may well be at the source of the above misconceptions, as the book tends to be regarded nowadays as nearly prophetic in its “vision of the future.” I put these words in quotes for a reason. Above all else, the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a reflection, however distorted, of Orwell’s own time. This is an idea hinted at even in the novel’s title, obtained by reversing the final two digits of the year the book was finished—1948. In the book, Orwell expresses his concerns about the apathy of British society, while his mustachioed Big Brother is a dead ringer for dictator Josef Stalin.

Of course, the widespread (and still extant) notion from the days of Gernsback that science fiction exists to foretell the future also had a helping hand in it. Granted, those were educated guesses that were advanced, but they were still guesses and, in the wider realm of probability, virtually as accurate as any other prediction. No matter how hard people try to look into the future, their knowledge and intellects are still grounded in the present; and although they can pretend to, they really can’t describe what they don’t already know. It was Francis Bacon who wrote that “books must follow sciences” and not the other way around. Not that books have much choice in that regard, really.

With the decline of Amazing Stories and the rise of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, speculative fiction shifted its focus from guesses about the future to a critique of the present and a more earnest contemplation of humanity. And so the mostly escapist fantasies about the far-flung future gave way to darker cautions against impending catastrophe. Not surprisingly then, speculative fiction has since seen more hells than it has heavens, peaking with the pessimistic rule of cyberpunk in the 1980s.

A few years before the New Wave emerged, Tolkien’s brand of fairy-tale fantasy took up the mantle of utopia. If the “perfect world” didn’t lie in a future that was surely hopeless, then it had to dwell in a romanticized version of the past, where doubt could be conveniently sidestepped for the mere sake of vacuous entertainment. Not exactly a new concept, this sort of (pseudo-) historical retreat that most high fantasy inspires, but it didn’t gain true momentum until the largely reassuring and uncomplicated Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in the United States after a tepid UK reception.

Given the choice between a commodified heaven and a provocative hell, it’s not hard to imagine where the general audience flocked to. Sadly, there’s a large number of readers who are reluctant to take risks, to stray from the beaten path. People like to be told what they want to hear, not have their assumptions continuously questioned, and it didn’t take long before the public started demanding more—more of the same. Naturally, publishers were happy to oblige.

Despite the different settings and casts of characters, the underlying archetypes for these stories remain basically the same. Each is a copy of a copy of a copy, and in spite of ever-increasing glitz, audiences keep getting treated to the lowest common denominator. This fiction hasn’t evolved like the rest of literature, because you can stray only so much from established formulas. “Expect poison from the standing water,” goes one of my favorite Proverbs of Hell. The chief casualty of the advance of commodified “sci-fi” and fantasy upon mass culture is, therefore, in the Department of Imagination. If things keep up like this, the color of the future will be gray.