Tag: narrative
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Hopepunk > noblebright
“The work is never finished. The work will never be finished. There will never be a nice, comfortable utopia where we can rest on our laurels and sip strawberry daiquiris by the pool and trust that now things are Fine and we can all relax. Utopia is not a stable system. It doesn’t last. The…
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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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Stories are allergic to indifference
I’m not making the facile if true observation that the contents of stories are lies, of one kind or another (that there is no such person as Oliver Twist, say; or that neither Hogwart’s School nor the subjects it teaches are real—you know: the obvious stuff). Nor am I presenting the equally facile observation that…
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Arming the archipelago / guerrilla na(rra)tion
If people don’t have the conceptual mechanisms in place to understand how narrative is created and employed to manipulate, then the better the fake, the more susceptible and increasingly large segment of the population becomes to this kind of attack. Maybe this kind of media literacy should be the domain of primary-school education not art-activism,…
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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…