Hi there! I’m still around. Real life has been very time-consuming over the past few months—mostly because of good things happening, not bad ones. It turns out that renovating a house and moving into it takes a very long time, and each step always takes longer than one has assumed. But now I have an actual DW post!
The root source of this post was the
Esquire “75 best SF books of all time” meme that
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cahn and
hamsterwoman, among others, have posted about. At some point I might write up more thoughts on the full list, but for now I’ll talk about the weird tangential rabbit hole this list caused me to fall into: former near-future dystopias that have passed their expiration date, so to speak. There should be a specific verb tense for describing an imagined future set in what is now our past.
George Orwell’s 1984 is on the list, no surprise, and seeing it made me think of how it’s been experienced differently at different times, even within my own family. My mother read it as a teenager in the 1960’s, and she told me that at the time 1984 seemed almost unimaginably far in the future. When I read it, in the early 90’s, 1984 had become the relatively recent past. The little girl who betrayed her father (Winston’s neighbor) to the Thought Police in the novel was seven years old, which is also the age I was in 1984; that connection gave me a bit of a chill. But some other aspects of the book struck teenage me as a little dated. For example, the “telescreens” in everyone’s houses, through which Big Brother would be constantly watching and ordering people to do morning calisthenics and so on: ha ha, so funny, imagining that your TV would be able to look back at you! Well, joke’s on me, now that website trackers and targeted ads and facial recognition are looking back at us through ubiquitous screens. Also, in contrast to my mom’s reading of the novel at the height of the Cold War, I was reading it at a time when the Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Iron Curtain was lifting, and it really felt as if this type of repressive regime might be disappearing from the world. So, another spot-on prediction by teen me. :( If S reads the book when she’s older, she’ll think of 1984 as a historical time decades before she was born, analogously to the way I think of, say, 1949 (when
1984 was first published). I wonder if high schools will still be assigning this book for English classes in the 2030’s.
The Esquire list also includes Kindred, by Octavia Butler, which I haven’t read, but I have read the Butler's Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents). These books came out in the 90’s, not too long after I read 1984—but Parable of the Sower opens in… 2024. I read them in the summer of 2020, which was either a very bad time or a perfect time to read them, depending on one’s perspective: I haven’t had any other experience of reading a dystopian novel that felt so completely dead-on. Beyond the closeness of the year, there were so many other uncanny echoes of then-current events. For one: the protagonist Lauren Olamina, who is a teenager when Parable of the Sower begins, doesn’t go to school; instead there’s a sort of collaborative homeschool situation with other local kids, because it’s considered too dangerous to leave the immediate neighborhood. Olamina’s father is a college professor, but he is mostly teaching remotely (which, hey, guess what I was doing at the time?), although he does have to go in to work once a week or so. Everyone is staying home not because of a pandemic, but because of a general societal breakdown brought on by interrelated climate and economic crises. Some institutions of “normal” American life are still hanging on—there’s still a national government, with an elected President; the university still offers classes—but there’s a sense that everything is in a downward spiral. There are marauding gangs who steal food and supplies, and/or just destroy stuff, and the lights of the big city in the distance grow fewer and farther between every year.
The big city in this case is LA, which is the other reason this hit so close to home for me. The initial chapters are set in a fictional town called Robledos, but it’s very clearly based on Pasadena, Butler’s hometown and a place that I know very well. (There may be a bit of Altadena mixed in, with the neighborhood streets extending up into the foothills.) Later in the book, Olamina and some companions set out to walk along the 118 freeway to the 101, which is a route that I’ve sometimes driven to work. So the setting was hauntingly familiar to me in the first book of the eulogy.
The second book, Parable of the Talents, opens in 2032, which is of course a Presidential election year. One of the leading candidates is a charismatic demagogue named Andrew Steele Jarret.
( cut for comparison of Jarret to a current political figure )
The Earthseed series takes its name from the new religion/belief system that Olamina founds. They’re working toward a long-term goal of human space exploration: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” I didn’t fully make this connection until I started writing this up, but the Earthseed adherents could be the precursors of the Utopian hive in Terra Ignota. They don’t get to have fun U-beasts or Nowhere coats, but they have the same drive and laser-focused sense of purpose. The Utopians fear that people may not want to leave Earth because it’s gotten too comfortable. Earthseed does not need to worry about that particular problem.
Another formerly-near-future dystopia on the Esquire list is The Children of Men, by P. D. James. I hadn’t previously read or heard of this, and when I saw it, my first thought was, “Really? That P. D. James?” All her other books, to my knowledge, are murder mysteries set in contemporary Britain—except for Death Comes to Pemberley, which is a murder mystery that is a Pride and Prejudice fanfic. So I was very curious to see what sort of SF she might have written.
The Children of Men was published in 1992, and takes place primarily in 2021, so we’re two for two on dystopias written in the 1990s that situate Bad Times in the 2020s. Coincidence? Well, probably yes. If you’re writing SF that wants to make a point about your present society and where it’s headed, 30-40 years out feels like a natural time interval to pick: far enough out to make major changes believable, but close enough to draw a direct line from current trends. It’s about the same interval that Orwell used in writing 1984.
The premise of The Children of Men is that humans have suddenly lost the ability to reproduce. Now an aging population is facing the extinction of the species within a few decades. Seeing this plot description, I was reluctant to begin reading another dystopia, on the grounds that if I wanted dystopia I could read the news. But, on the other hand, this seemed like a sort of… soft apocalypse, I suppose? There’s no nuclear war, climate disaster, or alien attack, just a slow quiet fading away. As it turns out, though, my apprehension was pretty well founded. While there’s no murder mystery as such, there are murders in plenty, both large-scale state-sponsored murder and individual murders, with several extremely brutal scenes. There’s an instance of child harm that I wasn’t expecting at all—it takes place in a flashback, back in “normal” times—and that bothered me quite a lot. I ended up having to read this book in small pieces, interspersed with lighter things.
In the novel, the last human children on record, known as the “Omegas,” were born in 1995–only three years after the book’s publication date, which is certainly a bold move. There’s no real explanation as to why. If Omega (also the name of the event) is due to a disease, or a reaction to some environmental toxin, it’s a very strange one: it seems to have hit everywhere in the world simultaneously, and produced no other symptoms aside from a lack of viable sperm (it is known to be specifically sperm and not eggs causing the issue). Opining on the origins of Omega, our protagonist Theo Faron muses, “Much of this I can trace to the early 1990s,” and then goes into a these-kids-today rant about alternative medicine, crystals, pornography, and falling birthrates in Europe in 1991. Incidentally, Theo is supposed to be 50 in 2021 (making him 6 years older than I am), and while this is a fine 50-year-old-man-style rant, it reads very oddly coming from someone who would only have been in his early 20s in the early 1990s. It makes me wonder if this is in fact James’s own voice coming through. At any rate, this got some major side-eye from me as an “explanation” of the sudden infertility, but I was assuming Theo was probably an unreliable narrator on this point—he’s an Oxford historian who comments that he has no particular aptitude for or interest in science—and that we might learn more later. But no: this is all we ever get; the novel is emphatically not interested in exploring the cause, or any scientific approach to a cure. Rather than being a prediction or a warning in the way that 1984 or the Earthseed books are, it’s more of a pure thought experiment: if this were to happen for whatever unknown reason, what would the consequences be? It might be reasonable to question whether this “counts” as science fiction at all—I’d call it philosophy fiction, maybe? Theo says the discovery that even frozen sperm previously stored for IVF was no longer viable “was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power.” Which is a theme that returns later—see spoilers below.
By 2021, the effects of Omega have rippled outward in time sufficiently that the apocalypse is no longer as soft as it once seemed. The Omegas have now reached age 25; some have formed lawless gangs of “Painted Faces” who ambush and attack travelers in rural areas; others are apparently hanging around Oxford in order to sneer contemptuously at everyone. “If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils,” Theo comments. The deserted streets and public spaces of Theo’s world in January 2021 feel eerily like scenes from the actual 2020-21, although of course the reason for the lack of crowds is different. The pandemic caused people to leave cities for less-populated areas if they could; Omega has caused the reverse, as the government has announced it will gradually stop supplying services to smaller towns as the population shrinks and ages.
A large part of the early part of the novel comes to us in the form of Theo’s diary entries. Theo is unfortunately not a super-fun companion on the page. We hear a lot about how he never loved his parents enough, never loved his ex-wife enough, never loved his daughter enough. He definitely doesn’t love, or even like, his cousin Xan Lypiatt, the Warden of England (so called because “Warden of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” didn’t sound “romantic” enough)—but that is only to be expected, given that Xan and his ruling Council are exactly as unpleasant as you might guess. We learn that at one point Theo was an “adviser” to Xan and the Council, but that he gave up that role and returned to being an ordinary Oxford professor, teaching classes for part-time mature students (obviously the only type of classes that now exist). Theo describes the rotten state of the world and the Council’s horrible policies in a very detached, passive, and mildly snobbish tone. At this point in the book, I was getting increasingly frustrated with Theo—partly because his narrative voice is annoying, but also, like, dude, you are in a uniquely privileged position here and you’re not taking advantage of it! You could say things to the Warden and he might actually listen! Do you not have opinions on how things are going?
But in honesty, part of the reason this annoyed me so much is that this is exactly how I’d be tempted to react in a real life apocalypse scenario: don’t get involved and try not to think about it. The fact that he’s initially behaving this way makes it a genuine moment of moral growth, maybe even mild heroism, when he eventually does decide to take action.
This comes about due to a request from Theo’s former student Julian. Side note: the professor-former student relationship is nicely depicted here: he remembers her as an intelligent but challenging student who wasn’t afraid to argue with him, wishes her well but seems a bit embarrassed to be encountering her in a new context without the teacher-student hierarchy. I googled the book while writing this up and saw that it has been made into a movie, in which they collapsed two characters into one by making Julian Theo’s ex-wife. I see why they did this—it simplifies things and also makes a later plot development more palatable—but it’s a shame to lose an interesting type of relationship that doesn’t appear so often in fiction.
Anyway, Julian asks Theo to talk to Xan and the Council on behalf of a small resistance group of which she is part. He eventually agrees (after trying to weasel out and then encountering some firsthand evidence that yes, things really are that bad). There are only five people in the resistance group, and they are making preposterously outsized demands: restore democracy to the country, stop the required biannual fertility tests for all healthy people of childbearing age, and stop several other horrific policies that I’m not going to describe here because this post is already long and grim enough. Naturally the Council is like, haha, no.
Nothing much happens for several months. The next development takes us into major spoilers.
( Spoilers )
Finally, I’m putting this part outside the spoiler cut since it contains only vague thematic spoilers: I ultimately found this book somewhat frustrating and unsatisfying as SF, because, well, I like science! (I’m sure this fact is not news to anyone reading my journal.) If something strange and terrible happens, I like seeing the process of people working out what’s going on and devising a solution. And that is not what this book is. It’s probably unfair of me to fault it for not being something completely different than it was intended to be, but there it is. Do I regret reading it? No: it definitely brought up some interesting thoughts, and I think it’s going to linger in my memory. But I’m pretty sure I’ve now exceeded the USDA Recommended Dystopia Intake Per Decade, so no more of that for me for a while. My next post will be about something fun, I promise! I’m thinking of writing about graphic novels for kids that I’ve been reading with S.
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