Real Life Has Made Dystopia Redundant

Brian Aldiss argues in The Guardian that real-life has made dystopia redundant.

We fought and did not heed the wounds, we were greedy and did not count the cost. For a while after the second world war, a spirit of optimism prevailed in SF magazines. It was a time of great projects, when rockets reached Mars, or we held what wars were available on Pluto, or we even dreamed of fleets of ships reaching far into the galaxy. It was Vasco da Gama time in the head. The unknown thrived. Hydroponic farms were built on asteroids, beautiful cities were designed to sail in solar orbits, marriages with sexy green-skinned aliens were arranged. All was stimulating and hopeful. But then the future went the other way - a duller, yet more dangerous way. The cold war began to blow instead. The lights went out in Cybernetics City.

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination. Our new and creepy scenario is already in the hands of the scientists, if not MGM.