I've just finished reading Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower. Published in 1993, the book spans the years 2024 to 2027 and should probably be mandatory reading for all of us.
The book opens on a bleak, dystopian USA, where an extreme right-wing president has just been elected at the 2024 election, Los Angeles is on fire and climate change has ravaged agricultural land. People are living in walled communities, violence is rife and all semblance of law has completely broken down in the face of the most basic human need: survival. The story follows the journey of a small group of people who are forced to flee Los Angeles and walk north in search of somewhere safe to live and build a new community.
How is it that so much science-fiction, written decades earlier, does end up seeming to come to pass?
After Trump was elected in 2016, protestors' placards read: "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!" (I'm sure we'll be seeing more of that one in the coming years.) Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 and is set in a post-democratic USA, renamed the Republic of Gilead, wherein women have been stripped of all rights and power and have no purpose as individuals, only as how they can be of use to the patriarchal system.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, depicts a dystopian world where technology would be used to manipulate and control the population, people would become addicted to mass media, babies would be conceived in test tubes and humanity's moral compass would cease to exist.
Are these writers our modern-day Nostradamuses?
The late Ursula K Le Guin, one of the 20th Century's most admired and popular science fiction writers, thought not:
While there are certainly elements of speculative and science fiction that ring true, fortunately humanity has been able to change direction in other areas. Butler's grim description of Los Angeles in 2024, written just over thirty years ago, however, is chilling in the light of the recent fires and the election of an extremist president with apparent totalitarian aspirations, who has essentially washed his hands (and those of his government) of any assistance to a state whose governor opposes his new regime.
Thought police? The incarceration of dissidents? Subjugation of women? Banning books? A cowed and compliant media? The science-fiction authors of the last century were holding up a distant mirror to where we're heading and it's not a pretty.
Le Guin's suggestion that a novelist's business is lying points only to the fact that writers of fiction, by definition, invent their stories. They are lying insofar as the story itself is not true. They are speculating on a future that may or may not happen. The authors looked at the the world as it was when they wrote their books, and asked "what if?" What if we don't change direction? Where's this likely to end?
Thankfully novelists also have a tendency to exaggerate - that's one of the things that makes fiction worth reading. But look closely at the core of the story and you'll see the seed from which it grew.
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Speculative and science-fiction dystopian novels (a brief selection):
Octavia E Butler: Parable of the Sower, 1993
George Orwell: 1984, 1949
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World, 1932
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale, 1985
Cormac McCarthy: The Road, 2006
Ray Bradbury: Farenheit 451, 1953
Emily St. John Mandel: Station 11, 2014
