For the last week, we’ve run stories, mostly fictionalized, offering dystopic visions of our possible futures.
Roland Dodds gave us a vision of Twitterized, market-driven education. Michael Cain shared the prologue of his in-progress novel, highlighting regional tensions and the fragility of our power grid. Guther Behn gave us a letter home from a foreign occupier cleaning up after the mess left behind by the breakdown of the theocratic successor state to the USA. Jaybird hypothesized that our present path will lead inevitably to national divorce. Aaron David projected massive pressures crushing individual identity. I suggested how the Constitution might be amended to ensconce authoritarianism while providing the tissue of legitimacy by way of elections. Christopher Carr hyperbolized a human resources objective quantification approach to evaluating political candidates. And Our Tod gave us an amusing reminder that fiction is not reality to close it all out.
While we’re formally closing Dystopia Week, should you have other ideas or writing that you’ve been working on for the symposium, by all means do finish it and let’s share them. We can in all likelihood find a place for them. Dystopiae are useful vehicles for illustrating real problems, real issues, even real solutions. The real point here is to get people thinking. We certainly don’t want to stop anyone from doing that.
Thank you to all our contributors and commenters and readers for participating in Dystopia Week!
I have something, but it’s long, and I ran out of time. Perhaps I’ll finish it and post it as a series for Fiction Fridays, or something.
That sounds very promising. Let me know if I can help.
I just couldn’t find a fictional voice in which to write my piece. Sorry.
I hope you’re continuing to write it in whatever voice is appropriate for it, and plan to submit it on its own?
I was very impressed by the range of styles.
A dystopia in which there is so very much material wealth that all of the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy are filled.
A society in which the only goods that anyone considers worth having are positional.
That’s the story I would have wanted to write.
Next time.
That is basically Nancy Kress’s “Beggars” series.
An appropriate series for JB, who’s been up for 30 hours.
There is some good Soviet SF involving this idea @jaybird I will see if I can dig up some more info for you.
Amusingly, JB, this was what I was trying to get out of my brain.
It didn’t work. Maybe I needed to try harder.