The Great Philosophical Divide in Science Fiction

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Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness. — Cioran, History and Utopia

There’s a fault line running in science fiction that predates it: the Great Optimism -Pessimism divide. The most obvious trope of each is the role of utopia/dystopia in the science fiction work, but that is slightly more complicated than it appears.

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Best Dystopian Films

1984
1984

Utopias had been the dominant literary form rather than dystopias in the past: Plato & Thomas Moore invented and re-invented the utopian society in order to present their political & economic views that did not extend further than coarse socialism. Once communism became a fact in the early 20th century, socialism switched from utopian fantasies to dystopian horror. Once we figured out how horrible socialism could be in reality, the utopian genre was extinct due to the death of the socialist dream. Zamyatin published We in 1921, not long after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, and ended up as the first book to be banned by the Soviets. Continue reading Best Dystopian Films