Doom, Gloom And Alternate Worlds

Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?

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Let’s see: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Fahrenheit 451, Dune, Brave New World, 1984, or perhaps the creepy dystopian adventure of our own developing horror story called real life? Hmmmm, actually some of those worlds look less threatening than day-to-day real life. Maybe not in a galaxy far, far away. Maybe right here.

It used to be that we read dystopian novels as sorts of parables for the worst that humans could do, and also as a sort of escape literature genre – we could escape to our own relatively sane world when we were tired of the horrors contrived by the authors.

Recently, I see a lot of parallels between the sci-fi worlds I used to temporarily visit and the one I actually inhabit. It makes the visit to the alternate present, or future, a lot less interesting. Because, day by day, it seems less like an escape and more like turning the page to another chapter in the idiocy that is actually going on in the world I inhabit. Why would I bother? Politicians holding public tantrums, and even two-timer artificial intelligence.

Well, OK, the rogue AI is still sci-fi, but not by much. So if we had a choice, which would it be?

Choose, but choose wisely?