Episode Details

The appeal of the apocalypse. Seems like everyone takes a stab at writing about the end times. What does it look like in your imagination?

Let’s remember that a lot, a LOT of what we have now was once imagined by writers. For example, Fahrenheit 451 predicted headphones, Frankenstein imagined transplants, Isaac Asimov predicted the rise of computers (link). Apple watches, self-driving cars, even video chatting were all predicted by writers who imagined a better way of doing everything.

They may not have had the science or engineering to make it happen, but writers certainly started the process by envisioning and then describing the technology that would come to be.

Okay, so then if writers are imagining dystopia, does that mean it’s inevitable? And why wouldn’t they spend more time focusing on utopia instead?

For the truly literary, there’s this list of Booker Prize dystopian fiction, many of which will have gone without your commercial-fiction sniff.  It does crown Margaret Atwood the reigning monarch of dystopian fiction after The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, were made into a TV series. 

This Wikipedia list probably better matches the ones that come to mind immediately:

Gulliver’s Travels

The Time Machine

Brave New World (Huxley)

Anthem (Rand)

1984 (Orwell)

Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)

Lord of the Flies

Minority Report

A Clockwork Orange

The Stand

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Giver

Cloud Atlas

The Road

The Hunger Games

The Maze Runner

Ready Player One

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