Dystopian fiction once reflected a concern about big, chillingly technocratic government. Now, our worry is something even worse.
The Handmaid’s TaleThe Hunger GamesIn the 2015-novel-turned-HBO-series Station Eleven, the government gets entirely wiped out by a a mystery disease. | Courtesy of HBO
. It stands to reason that we’d connect with stories that question the state’s ability to marshal a consolidated plan of action, let alone protect us from the apocalypse.a time when apocalypse wasn’t a staple of the movies and literature; it feels like we have a deep-seated impulse to contemplate our doom.
contamination. There were powerful natural forces, like hurricanes, that grew more frequent with global warming. And novelists took note. In Suzanne Collins’ 2008 young-adult novel, ecological disasters lead to global battles over resources, and the U.S. government falls in the conflict. In Margaret Atwood’spollution leads to a worldwide fertility crisis. The worst-case scenario isn’t human misery, but extinction.
It’s scary, all right — and Atwood’s work predicted today’s pitched battles over reproductive rights. But toward the end of the 20thcentury, some writers were putting forth a different, and more prescient, vision of government under pressure, says Amelia Hoover Green, a former political science professor at Drexel University who taught a course on dystopias and political philosophy. One of the writers who “had everything right,” she says, was Octavia E. Butler.
. A quest for profits, by venal fund management companies, leads to the biohazard that causes the outbreak. The movie’s biggest villain is a puffy corporate executive who will sacrifice anyone to the zombie hordes to save himself. The government, meanwhile, is almost comically powerless. As the zombies start to spread, a public official goes on TV and assures everyone that the civil response is going great. The camera cuts to an overhead shot of a country in flames.
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