Tag: dystopia
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Ballard (1962), The Drowned World
I thought I’d read this before, many years ago, and perhaps I did – the handful of dog-eared pages in my paperback copy suggest someone read it, though perhaps I acquired it second-hand. Or perhaps I buried my memories of reading it, whether deliberately or unintentionally? That would certainly be a Ballardian response to a…
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Distort some central part of the present condition
Some wisdom from Uncle Warren: TCJ: I talked to a sci-fi editor at Tor in late 2016 about dystopias and their popularity in eras fraught with political disaster, and he said something that stuck out to me: “I think one of the underrated reasons that people read science fiction in particular is that it’s a…
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The Greimas square-dance
More KSR on anti-anti-utopianism, this time at Commune Magazine: Clearly we enter here the realm of the ideological; but we’ve been there all along. Althusser’s definition of ideology, which defines it as the imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence, is very useful here, as everywhere. We all have ideologies, they are a necessary…
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A certain hermetically sealed quality
Like nightmares, dystopias have a certain hermetically sealed quality. By their nature, they are inescapable—a dystopia you can escape from is not a dystopia, it is the third hour of Love, Actually. The circumstances that create any brave, new world simultaneously cauterize its edges and destroy memories of the world before. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, as…
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Kahneman’s pre-mortems: dystopia as clusterfuck avoidance strategy
I’m not much of one for citing economists approvingly, but in this QZ piece devoted to distinguishing a clusterfuck situation from a mere SNAFU or shitshow, there’s an interesting note on Daniel Kahneman’s approach to forward planning: Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is…