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Sci-fi dystopias to help you navigate a post-truth world

By Alvin Soon - on 23 Jul 2017, 9:11am

The news came out last week that George Orwell’s classic science-fiction novel, 1984, leaped to the top of Amazon’s charts — barely a week after US President Donald Trump took office. 

Is 1984’s resurgence a coincidence? Probably not.

Written in 1949, 1984 depicts a bleak future where a totalitarian regime rules the land formerly known as Great Britain. Individualism is persecuted, independent thinking is a “thoughtcrime” enforced by the Thought Police, and state-sanctioned misinformation is spread by the Ministry of Truth.

Just a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer lambasted the media for accurately reporting the low numbers of people who attended. Spicer also simultaneously claimed that “no one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out,” but also that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration.” On the Sunday that followed, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway framed Spicer’s falsehoods as “alternative facts.”

These events chillingly evoke what Orwell wrote about “2 + 2 = 5” in 1984:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Dystopian sci-fi shows us worlds where technology and society have gone horribly wrong, and challenges us to question how we might prevent ourselves from getting there. That probably explains why people are turning to 1984 at a time like this when facts are belittled and technology makes it easier than ever for fake news to go viral. 

People have always turned to stories not just for entertainment, but for a way to make sense of the world around us. 1984 is a great sci-fi book, but it’s not the only one. Here are other sci-fi dystopias to help you navigate a post-truth world.

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is often mentioned in the same breath as 1984, but while they both paint bleak futures, they do it in very different ways.

1984 takes dystopia to its extremes, and images a world where people are oppressed by total control. Brave New World goes the other way and takes utopia off the cliff. In Brave New World, everyone is delighted by total control; people are provided for, with plenty of pleasures to distract them. They’re even plied with an opium-like drug, called ‘soma,’ to help them forget their troubles.

Huxley saw mass consumerism and mass distraction happen decades before it came true. If you don’t think you’d ever allow yourself to be oppressed by an authoritarian dictatorship, read Brave New World and consider if you’d ever be so pleased with one that you’d hardly care.

Fahrenheit 451

Imagine a world where books are banned and ‘firemen’ burn them on site. In this future, few people even care about reading and learning anymore, as they have short attention spans that prefer TV (smartphones hadn’t been invented yet when the book was written).

For some, Fahrenheit 451 is a parable that warns against the dangers of censorship. For others, it’s a revealing take on how people can forgo the hard work of relationships for the easy pleasures of entertainment. For all, it’s a warning against losing the ability to actually read a book and learn from it.

The Hunger Games trilogy

On one level, The Hunger Games is about Katniss Everdeen and how she tries to protect her family against a tyrannical government.

On another level, The Hunger Games is about how young children are forced to battle to the death, in a televised event that’s thinly marketed as ‘entertainment,’ but is really a way for the pathological Capitol to keep the citizenry in check. It’s reality TV, where the emotional suffering of others is broadcast for amusement, taken to a sick extreme.

The Hunger Games also explores how Everdeen herself is exploited as part of a massive PR machine for both sides. Even after she survives her first Hunger Games (spoiler), she finds herself being used for propaganda, first for the Capitol, then for the rebellion.

Transmetropolitan

If reading grim tales about being exploited by The Man brings you down, indulge your ‘fight the power’ fantasies with Transmetropolitan.

Written by Warren Ellis, this 60-issue comic series follows rebellious journalist Spider Jerusalem in the far (but not too far) future as he battles two corrupt US presidents with — yes — the power of truth. While Jerusalem is a crusty, foul-mouthed ass much of the time, he also deeply believes in speaking truth to power and standing up for the downtrodden.

Transmetropolitan will also blow your mind with its fantastical, and maniacal, science-fiction. Jerusalem’s world is one where people upload themselves into clouds composed of nano robots, alter their bodies with alien DNA, and wallow in all kinds of taboos that technology has made mundane. Warning: Mature content to be imbibed by adults only.

Harry Potter

Here’s one more. It’s not science fiction, it’s fantasy: the Harry Potter series, specifically The Order of the Phoenix. Harry Potter and his allies try to warn the wizarding world that its greatest enemy has returned from the grave, but they’re met with derision and smeared with a media campaign designed to discredit them. Who can forget Dolores Umbridge smiling, as she forces Potter to write “I must not tell lies” while his hand bleeds?

Alvin Soon

Alvin Soon / Former Deputy Editor

I like coffee and cameras, but not together.

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