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Dystopia as a muse for fiction

There is one positive aspect of the increasing darkness we see all around us – the climate emergency; the victory of anti-democratic forces; the increasing number of refugees; the continuation of proxy wars; the smouldering animosity between nations; the expansion of hate-speech; the erosion of civil rights; the development of technologies for mass surveillance; the spread of motiveless crime; the destruction of the biosphere; the resurgence of religions; the growing gaps between rich and poor; the prevalence of modern slavery, the subservience of the state to corporations; the loss of culture and of cultural diversity and all the rest – it is a fertile bed for the imagination. Ugliness and nastiness are a perfect palate for great art. Good books and films are incubated in dark places. The horrors of World War II and the fascist regimes of the time continue to be a source of great movies. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are a recurring feature of science fiction. The horrors of the feudal era and of warring kingdoms inspire fantasy like that of George R R Martin. As things get worse, the literature gets better. Regardless of the consequences, whether, say, novels and films about climate change, are actually effective in spurring us to action, or whether imaginative fiction about dark regimes can urge the populace to vote for change, such art has a value in its own right. It keeps us engaged, entertained and enthralled, immerses us in realities that are even worse than the one we are presently suffering. The present is dark and the future may be blacker, but we live not only in reality but in our dreams, and usually these stories of wretched hyper-realities are populated by sympathetic figures and heroes who need to find their way in the darkness; either through ingenuity, by discovering their superpowers, through the exercise of compassion and humanity, or by cleaving to other hapless human beings in a similar plight.

When things get really bad, and worse, will this kind of fiction still be popular, or will we prefer to imagine better worlds – fantastic realities like the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins? Will we place a positive spin on the present? The Middle Ages, a period of poverty, rapaciousness and pillage, cultivated fantasies of chivalry and romance. The only constant is the power of the imagination to overcome the constraints of a crooked and flawed existence.

Then there’s another school of thought: we can simply own up to what is happening around us, and, without worming away from it by recourse to the imagination, acknowledge facts as facts, understand that they are part of a continuum in a reality that is full of different potential, and live in consciousness and awareness of the whole. Probably the only valuable kind of action is that in which consciousness is fully present, informed not by imagination but by the actual or potential consequences.