/lit/ - Literature

>>10886048

Do you mean alternate, dystopian societies? I think this kind of fiction is slowly but surely turning into boredom territory, precisely because we are finding out only the worst parts of it are actually starting to be mimicked by reality. Our worst cyberpunk nightmares were unable to predict the levels of geopolitical constrain we are going through right now, with individual freedoms galore yet economical freedom going all the way down the drain. We have no decision nor awareness of the frame surrounding our society while at the same time being bombarded with "choice" and nearly unlimited distractions.

Society has become a Boring New World instead of a Brave one, and there is no new lessons to be gained from that fiction, once it has come to reality in the worst scenario possible.

>>10886075
In high school I was made aware of this book in particular, and we had to do an evaluation of it and write a report, etc. One thing I've noticed is that YA fiction authors have kind of exploited this genre and write stuff that doesn't have the same nuance or educated background that previous books of the genre illustrated. Like, compare divergent and 1984. Technically speaking, they are the same genre, but written very differently and not so much being commentaries on historical societies or modern day progressive inclinations in terms of social engineering. In that way I can relate to what you're referring to there.

>>10886075
And yes, I am referring to alternate, dystopian societies although I think out of that particular genre I prefer the older books that make complex criticisms of extremist ideologies.

>>10886093

I agree very much with that sentiment. In many ways, I believe we have forgotten how to criticize such societies because we pretty much live in one by now. We are finding it harder and harder to imagine a re-framed world, one that is not superficially or technically, but rather fundamentally different from ours.

For many reasons, I would say this is a direct consequence of atomization and social annihilation of our usual smaller communities (e.g families, neighborhoods, your scout boy troops, whatever you want to call it) in favor of a globalized network of ironically isolated people. We can't conceive anything external to our world because our world is trying to encompass everything. If we are "one tribe" there is no other model of society, nor even any alternative project of modernity to base our fiction on, and coming up with something alone is justifiably difficult to do.

With that, it's easy to see why things such as Ready Player One, Hunger Games and other dystopias are unable to effectively deviate from what we already see in our day-to-day, in spite of being set in fantastic worlds that should, but do not, feel different from our own, not even as an extrapolation of its trends. It's literally just technology separating us from these works of fiction, there is no extra amount of social engineering nor adaptation required, which is at once dreadful, sad and suspiciously dangerous.

I would also nod to the fact that, like you observe, things like Handmaid's Tale and Altered Carbon (from the 80's and the 2000's respectively) are making a comeback in the form of series, and you can see even in these the stark contrast to the YA fiction developed only a decade later. It was probably around then that our society made the very subtle jump from globalizing atomization to past-atomized hellhole.

>We live in a le mix BNW and 1984 xDDDDDDDDDDddDDDDD
BAN all dystopian fiction
REMOVE the name of George Orwell
KILL every armchair political philosopher

>>10886048
Real dystopian futures:

Automation makes the majority of people redundant People live off welfare checks and become more degenerate than we can possibly imagine.

Automation makes the majority of people redundant; The elites kill off the majority of humanity.

Automation makes the majority of people redundant: People rebel and destroy industrialized society and revert to pre-industrial state.

The old dystopias thought in terms of Stalin and Hitler. That shits in the past. The real future lies with resource scarcity and technology.

Option B there is the most likely future outcome.

>>10886216

I think the precise point here is that we live in neither, but rather a very boring version of the worst aspects of things we used to preemptively dread from the evolution of tech such as mass surveillance and unimaginable inequality. None of it is concretely dystopian, it's just barely good enough for us to say out loud that our lives are getting better, while simultaneously and utterly failing to correspond to the actual potential of technological advance. Kind of like a bad joke where you get fully automated gay luxury communism for 1% of people and fully automated gay underpaid rent capitalism for everyone else. This has nothing to do with fully mirroring an alternate project of society into our own (and, to be fair, your wish was already fulfilled, there is little to no 'truly' dystopian fiction now, it's just plain "what if our world was our world but at a different stage of tech?").

>>10886237
>or

Communism repeats itself until we all go extinct. I.E Venezuela and North Korea.

>>10886507
Although I suppose option B is covered in that scenario.

>>10886240
Wow! So insightful Anon! Society and mass consumerism are sooooooooo alienating!

>>10886216
>and so he wrote it
>and so it became

>>10886216
Tbh though we have a lot more freedom than either of those societies, that window of freedom is closing very quickly.

>>10886532
yeah liberals are going to ban free switch and take away our guns

>>10886522

It's actually not alienating but hyper-focusing. Then again, I think you're just bashing dystopian novels rather than thinking about politics at all

>>10886542
but drugs are okay anon, and so is mass immigration into 1st world countries

nothing wrong at all
its all okay
smoke your weed, relax, nothing to worry about