Countup from Dystopia

Contra Naomi Klein... dystopian fiction was popular in the 1970s, too.

This is rather amusing, in its way:

Dystopian fiction is hot right now, with countless books and movies featuring decadent oligarchs, brutal police states, ecological collapse, and ordinary citizens biting and clawing just to survive. For bestselling author Naomi Klein, all this gloom is a worrying sign.

...because Naomi Klein apparently has no idea whatsoever that the 1970s was probably the Golden Age of Dystopian fiction, Eco-collapse edition.  Including, I might add, a lot of overconfident predictions about global warming that never actually happened.  In fact, pretty much none of the things that were worried about then - overpopulation, choking pollution, the loss of every species less hardy than the cockroach, nuclear war, mass famine, running out of oil, running out of water, running out of air, and of course the obligatory dictatorships made up of the authors' least favorite American social groups - didn't actually happen, either.  

Shoot, even the Soviet Union fell down and went boom just as soon as Ronald Reagan kicked it in the groin.

And so disaster will probably be averted here, too. Oh, maybe it won't. Maybe we really are doomed this time. But we've been doomed before; and it's surprising that Naomi Klein won't at least nod to the past confident assertions of disaster.  Although it should not surprise me that anyone with as high an opinion of Margaret Atwood - a woman who was spectactularly wrong in predicting future history in The Handmaid's Tale - might be somewhat deficient in other aspects of this particular literary genre.

On the other hand, Ms. Klein got me to post something here after two years! So, go her.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

Escape from New York.

Name: Escape from New York

Type: Movie

Written in: 1981

Set in: 1998

"Apocalypse Not."

That is the title of a slightly surprisingly good article from Wired, slamming the stunningly bad track record of various groups when it comes to predictions of looming catastrophe - and that 'surprisingly good' is not meant to be a reflection on the magazine; more like a reflection on the oddity of finding people willing to deprive our modern apocalyptic cultists of their 'fun' via the administration of objective reality.  Besides, author Matt Ridley is to be commended for taking the next logical step of bringing up global warming, particularly since the first batch of Great Prophecies of Climate Change DOOM are past their sell-by date (Ridley even calls out IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri for declaring in '07 that '12 was the 'tipping point'). 

Just... one quibble.

A sort of observation, sort of slam: Logan's Run.

This would be a comment on the movie, not the book (I haven't read the book). Watch this clip: notice what's missing? Yup. People who aren't white. A somewhat common theme in 1970s and 1980s-style post-apocalyptic film, alas: apparently, Caucasians are apparently particularly prone to survive the End Times. Either that, or Hollywood had a bad habit of not hiring minorities for crowd scenes, let alone supporting roles. The application of irony in this is left as an exercise for the interested reader. Moe Lane PS: Yes, I know: it hasn't happened yet, so we don't know that it won't turn out this way. Still, I think that we've safely avoided a world where the young are running it (and apparently, literally into the ground)...

A very minor note: GURPS OGRE.

It's not particularly earth-shattering or anything, but while consulting my copy of GURPS Ogre in preparation for the release of the game later this year I noted in the book's timeline that this year (2012) is supposed to be the one where the USA runs out of oil.

Which is, of course, not even remotely true.  But it's based on assessments that a lot of people took seriously ten to thirty years ago - and, to be fair, those people were generally acting in good faith when they received the information, even if the people that disseminated it may not have been - so expect a rash of curiously-dated gaming and SF material to intrude on one's consciousness.  So it goes.

Not really one (Branch Point)

Sorry, folks: I did have one to go over - Branch Point by Mona Clee (alt-history written by somebody who was perhaps a little too upset over what happened to Bill Clinton)... but then I realized that the 'why it's relevant' would have been 'because it made Moe waste two bucks at the used book store over a decade ago.' That probably isn't enough.

So let me just cheat and note something (SPOILERS):

Old RFK ad.

This is not quite a 'real' CfD, but it is kind of interesting: If only to remind folks that doom-mongering has been going on for quite a while. I also have some critical things to say about the short alternate history story "Dispatches from the Revolution" - which is a story that draws heavily on RFK as a change point - but I haven't decided which website to put it on yet.

Car Wars

Name: Car Wars, by Steve Jackson Games

Type: Board/Roleplaying Game (armored and armed car warfare on the dystopian highways of a future America).

Written in: 1980, to begin with; there have been multiple supplements since.  1996 is the publication date of the latest roleplaying supplement (GURPS Autoduel).

Set in: 2030-2046; I'm doing this one because according to the official timeline Rounds One and Two of Everything Turns To Crap were supposed to have happened by now.

Why it's a dystopia: For our purposes?  Well, at this point the country's supposed to have lost Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana in a civil war; legalized blood sports; watched the environment go Full Metal Ehrlich; and suffered through a decade of domestic terrorism.  And this is the part of the timeline that the future inhabitants are going to be nostalgic about.

Why it's significant: Honestly?  Much as I love this game - and I do, I do - I'm doing it because it's a handy referent to peak oil in popular culture.

What happened?  Well, the environmental estimates were as accurate as they always were - for some reason, radical Greenies really do tend to forget that rich people breathe oxygen, drink water, and metabolize organic material, too - but it's the peak oil thing that is probably the tell, here.

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

It Can't Happen Here.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935