1. Julie D says:

    The more I learn in environmental science, the more depressed I get. Seriously, it seems like the world is running out of everything and none of the solutions are economically or socially viable. Maybe that’s why I read very little dystopia or cyberpunk–projections are drab enough.

    • Which is exactly what you would expect from a groaning world (Rom. 8), suffering because sinful man has subjected it to sin. However, the “environmental science” that insinuates either that all hope is lost or that man, through the right combination of political solutions and micromanaging mega-corporate regulation, can save the Earth, is not nearly “science” as much as religion in a white lab coat.

      I’ll recycle, conserve, all that good stuff, not to “save the Earth,” but only to shave a few precious nanoseconds off the final refining burn/resurrection process that Christ will accomplish on planet Earth when He returns (2 Peter 3).

  2. Cerddaf says:

    I can’t help but agree with the downbeat view of the future, but my worry is that some of the cyberpunk dystopias seem to offer nothing in place of a society divided between the Lords in their electronic castles and the peasants living in a mindless mess of mafia gang wars fighting each other rather than opposing the perpetual oppression.

    I think there are ways out, but we need to find how to attack the roots of the disease, not just the symptoms (or we are no better than the politicians who gain office by an auction every 5 or 4 or whatever years of promises they know they cannot keep).

    In UK there is a Freedom of Information Act. I’m sure the Labour party didn’t realise what they were doing when they passed it, but it gives power to the people to find out what is going on, and it works.

    A writer’s job is not just to point out the problems, we should be pointing out the answers as well, and speculative fiction is the right place to do it. Freedom of Information is one step that way. We need to go further.

    Obviously Orwell was wrong in not forseeing a computerised society. Does that matter? What is more important is his message, that the best of movements (Orwell was a Socialist) can be usurped and corrupted into a tyrrany.
    My criticism is that I only wish he had offered some hope for the future.

What do you think?