The Republic of Heaven

This is a question sparked by discussions, in private and on irc, about Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Of all the unpleasant futures or alternate pasts you've seen in books and films or any other sort of fiction (real history doesn't count), if you had to pick one to participate in, which would it be?

I'll leave it up to you whether to restrict these ideas to just Earth, or further in the future on other worlds.

Can you please provide a list of potential dystopian futures/alt-realities/otherworlds that we could choose from? I'm too lazy to go find myself a book and am having trouble recalling more than a few.

Does Minority Report count as a dystopian future? I mean it's actually pretty awesome. Maybe it's both utopian and dystopian. If not then I'd say Blade Runner because it had a nice multi cultural vibe.

Can you please provide a list of potential dystopian futures/alt-realities/otherworlds that we could choose from? I'm too lazy to go find myself a book and am having trouble recalling more than a few.

I was having a similar problem myself. I'll list the ones that come to mind or to Wiki, but anyone who has another in mind is certainly welcome to bring it up instead.

Authors not included because it would mean closing italics tags on every line and I'm lazy
1984
Fahrenheit 451
Snow Crash
Farnham's Freehold
Brave New World
Anthem
Soylent Green
We
Harrison Bergeron
A Clockwork Orange
The Handmaid's Tale
And so on. Wikipedia has lists of dystopian books, films, comics, and games, if more inspiration is sought.

Oooo, what a great thread!

I really wouldn't like to live in the world of Atwood's Oryx and Crake or Mattheson's I am Legend.
As for a nice Utopia to live in, the Earth of Star Trek sounds quite nice even though you never get to see a lot of it - they've abolished money and racism.

Eugenics aside, we're already living in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

As for Utopias, I'll settle for Iain M Banks' Culture. Effing big spaceships, you live as long as you like, you only have to do work you enjoy and there's oodles of sex! What more could you want?

The other dystopia we're living in is EM Forster's The Machine Stops (1909). Forster's portrayal of present-day Internet culture (people blog, have flists, do webcasts) is breath-taking in its predictive accuracy.

Do we have to restrict ourselves to books? Because the Firefly 'verse would be a pretty shiny place to live (provided you were hanging out with a group of people like the Serenity crew, and nowhere near Reaver territory, of course). Of course Firefly and its 'shabby space' setting (as opposed to Star Trek's 'shiny space') owes a lot to the conventions established by Bladerunner.

I think Victor Kelleher does the best dystopias. Of course, no one besides Raphael will know what I'm talking about, but I encourage you all, at the very least, to read Parkland, Taronga and The Beast of Heaven and then come back to me (ashen-faced and looking suspiciously at every human being you encounter) and we'll talk about dystopias! I have not read books by any other author that caused me to so profoundly question my own humanity (and whether we should use the word 'humanity' to mean 'superior compassion') or shatter so many of my own convictions. I wish his work was more widely known outside Australia, as I think it's among the best literature - not only SF/F, but literature in general - that I've ever read.

I'm probably getting a bit too gushy, but I really do recommend these works very highly. I've only mentioned his two best known dystopic works (Parkland and Taronga) and the book which is in my opinion his best (The Beast of Heaven) but he's written many others and most of them are well worth reading.

Communism that works would be good. Imagining my own future here.

Communism that works would be good. Imagining my own future here.

That sounds rather like The Culture, one of my favourite Utopias.

Why dystopian? Utopian futures are much more nice.

But anyway, I'd go with the one from Star Trek XI. I'm not sure if it counts as dystopian but still, I wouldn't mind.

FOLLOWUP: No, it doesn't. OK, Terminator Salvation.

Was reading this article over at io9, and thought of this thread. Thought sraffies might like a read.

They left out the original Corporations Own You dystopia - Pohn and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.