Pessimistic Books About The Future?
07-11-02 | 04:52 PM
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07-11-02 | 08:31 PM
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From: Virginia
"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess (one of my favorites) is a pretty downtrodden view of the future. I read the 21 chapter version and wasn't expecting it to become a coming-of-age story.
07-11-02 | 10:18 PM
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From: Parts, Unknown
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner is a good example. A lot of late sixties and early seventies science fiction novels and stories are really pessimistic about the future.
07-12-02 | 04:15 PM
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From: Somewhere cold
Wow, I was just about to ask a similar question about bad future/end of the world kind of books. I just finished reading "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle and I always find it a depressing book, as well as other end of the world scenarios (Pretty much anything by K. Vonnegut too). And "White Plague" by Frank Herbert was pretty depressing too.
07-21-02 | 11:16 AM
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Brave New World is generally mentioned in the same breath as 1984. In college one year I wrote a long essay that discussed how the themes were different. I think the gist was that in 1984 they were oppressed from without, whereas in Brave New World they were oppressed from within. Or something.
07-21-02 | 05:31 PM
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From: Greenville, SC
Originally posted by Breakfast with Girls
Brave New World is generally mentioned in the same breath as 1984. In college one year I wrote a long essay that discussed how the themes were different. I think the gist was that in 1984 they were oppressed from without, whereas in Brave New World they were oppressed from within. Or something.
Brave New World is generally mentioned in the same breath as 1984. In college one year I wrote a long essay that discussed how the themes were different. I think the gist was that in 1984 they were oppressed from without, whereas in Brave New World they were oppressed from within. Or something.
In Brave New World, everyone was oppressed by the process of child rearing in that society, but the worst opression was self imposed when most people chose to use soma and not deal with reality.
I think that Brave New World is a more plausible view of our near future. Neil Postman wrote an interesting book against the practice of watching television called Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he makes a long comparison between soma and television. Not that we need that comparison, soma is alive and well in most forms of escapism.
