Why do we like dystopias so much?
When you get down to it, despite a reputation for being high-flying and forward-looking, science fiction more often indulges in – and often seems to be consumed by – not hope for the future or wonder at the possibilities of scientific advancement, but rather fear. Fear of the future, fear of technology, fear of the unknown, the works. For every inventive gadget or futuristic concept mankind dreams up there’s almost sure to be a scifi story about why this is a terrible idea and going to kill and/or enslave everybody. It often seems as though the genre of the future would rather flee into the past, delivering lesson after lesson about how anything that changes the status quo is bad, to the point where real people view emerging technology with extra heaps of fear and suspicion specifically because every time it crops up in fiction it’s somehow evil.
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