The New Dystopia

I just read Craters, a short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and it's left me feeling very thoughtful. It's a near-future SF piece about a journalist going into a refugee camp in an age where everyone has microchips inside them for identification and the war on terror is in disturbing place. I'll try not to give any spoilers - to read it yourself go here http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/craters/

While I'm not sure Rusch was deliberately writing a dystopia it certainly is one. I should probably explain what I mean by dystopia, it's not that common a term ironically enough. The best explanation is an example, the archetypal dystopia is George Orwell's 1984. Essentially they're opposite of utopias; where society has turned to some other thing, a controlled status quo. The core dystopias include Huxley's Brave New World, Vonnegut's Player Piano and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. These all show an imperfect world where free thought and action is restricted or forbidden by some means or another – and most people are happy about it, or think they are.

Rusch hasn't done what those stories do; Craters is not demonstrating the society or showing how the dystopia works. This is the frightening thing, the story is simply set in a world where the state has means of control; security is paramount over liberty and everyone lives according to these paradigms. In other words, it takes elements of today's world and extends them, quite logically and very plausibly.

I don't mean to suggest the world Rusch sets her story in has the drastic levels of control Orwell established. Rather it has simple things, things we already have and elevates them. James Cameron did the same thing in Dark Angel; even V for Vendetta treads some sort of middle ground between the two. We may not be going in the direction of nameless autocracies as some older dystopias suggested; but these near-future stories are as dystopian in spirit as ever even if they don't mean to be.

I'm not sure how well I'm explaining any of this – the ideas are still flying about in my head – but I guess what I'm getting at is that SF has shifted from drastic visions of potential realities to subtler extensions of current issues. And if that's the case we really need to think about how the world around us is going and if there's anything we can do about.

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