Well that didn't work out like I expected. When I was a mere youth, the future was mostly settled, at least in the long term. Mankind had at long last put foot on the Moon and that new perspective was supposed to shock our collective systems and get us all to act in the common interests of the species and the world, and not in the name of nation states necessarily. Of course that's an idealistic notion and might still happen a hundred from now, but I won't live to see it. What we have had the last fifty years is more rancor both old and new, and oddly a fear of the future which has resulted in a fear of science. That gives us climate-change denial and that might be the epitaph for the species. But there have been many a poet and otherwise telling us of futures in which man and woman are not all they can be, but are held in check by the whims and raw power of the most powerful among us. And that gave rise to the dystopia, a particular form of fiction which takes a gander at the world ahead of us and says this could really be a problem. In its purest motive the dystopia is hygenic and designed to lead us away from wrong turns, but sadly like those aggravatingly fit but persistently dim teenagers in most every horror flick we keep making the same mistakes. This month at the Dojo a bunch of dystopias will be highlighted. It ain't the end of the world exactly, but you can see it from there.
Rip Off
As the great bluesman might've sung:"We don't need Distopia when
ReplyDeletewe can get Dat topia."