Ask Lemmy

"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The Farm, immediately. - death sentence in Ellison's book 'A Boy and His Dog'

People are talking about really wonderful interesting things, but I can't even choose between those I'm thinking about.

Star Wars EU - because that's what I see around. Lots of stupidity, evil and decay, but in the end there's the sky and the life with all its beauty. The old part of it, which mostly was happening after Empire's institution while the rebels were not something close to victory in anyone's opinion.

Vacuum Flowers - that's the "worse is better" evolutionary optimism. That it will all become only worse, there's no good defeating evil, we will all die, but - life finds a way, humanity finds a way, and so on. It will go on.

Heinlein's Door into Summer - some parts are too much like our reality.

Actually I think all 3 have the same general idea, I just can't quite catch it.

I do believe that a lot of aspects of The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson have chances of becoming true.

The deadly heatwave in south Asia, governments going rogue and playing with geo engineering on their own, climate refugee camps and the general sense of too little too late.

But the book is fairly optimistic, so hopefully, people of the world getting together and accepting a new paradigm will come to be true.

Idiocracy.

Birth rates are down everywhere and the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them. Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.

Brave New World

In some ways we’re already living it

How far ahead do you want to go? The Borg are a more likely future phase of humanity than Star Trek's Federation, though without FTL travel, we're gonna be stuck crawling from rock to rock in our own neighbourhood for a very long time.

There's also a bit in old kid's TV show The Girl From Tomorrow where, at one point, something mucks up the timeline so badly that the future she comes from ceases to exist and all of the Earth's land ends up an uninhabitable desert, devoid of life. That seems pretty likely too.

These two things are not mutually exclusive either.

Been reading Corey Doctorow lately and catch myself thinking, "Aw c'mon! That's not how it works!" And then remember, he's writing about the near future.

WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.

A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy

100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.

The Simpsons

The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US

I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.

V for Vendetta

Idiocracy/Dont look up/1984/Judge Dredd

All of the negatives from Metropolis 2001

Metropolis (2001): How Capitalism Produces Fascism

The Temporal Messages of Metropolis

Elon Musk = Duke Red

The Road.

If we don't dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.

I think that it'd have to be one of those countless near-future works that are set in what basically amounts to being the present-day world.

I think that if you're looking for something other than that, something more in a far-out setting, you'd need to ask something like "what futuristic work do you think society will most resemble in 200 years" or something like that. That forces things down the road a bit, and makes one pick among different predictions about how society will change in the future.

Her.

Idiocracy but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.

A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones

Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn't even exist in reality.

You better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia, Miss Turner. You're in one!

Not sure which one. But we already pretty much check all the boxes of cyberpunk.