The Future’s So Bright?
So how much does a person’s beliefs about humanity affect their vision of the future?
John Otte
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Jun 6, 2012
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Oops, I did it again. Oh, wait. Never mind. Here’s another video.
John W. Otte leads a double life. By day, he’s a Lutheran minister, husband, and father of two. He graduated from Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a theatre major, and then from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. By night, he writes unusual stories of geeky grace. He lives in Blue Springs, Missouri, with his wife and two boys. Keep up with him at JohnWOtte.com.
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That intro, with the music and the closeup of you reading the book, earns you +100 GP (Geek Points)! 😉
I think this is a very good analysis of the differing views of progress and human society in mainstream media. I don’t have anything to add right now, but I’ll certainly watch the discussion.
Pretty good. Joss Wheedon, like the one who wrote Buffy? Oh wow, I’m interested.
I’m not sure our futures should always be bright. Now, eventually, all is made right and Good is assured victory. Telling the British that in 1913 doesn’t mean the Somne won’t happen or that the line won’t bog down and all be twisted and almost ruined in between. As far as I can tell, by the time I leave college, the world will be significantly darker than it was when I entered. There’s always going to be suffering.
I think you’re right– it’s vicarious. (You can say that about reading in general, now that I think about it) I think to some extent it helps that people my age share a single terrible moment in history, when the TV turned on when we were children and two burning dark towers burned into our memories. The End of the World is sort of something people who are now 15-22 think about a lot.
I would point out that Hunger Games are just a jagged tip– dystopian futures has been a YA thing for a while now. Quite a few have done that before Collins (many of them did it better, not that she’s bad.)
Julius,
I think your absolutely right — 9/ll (love your description by the way, it brought tears to my eyes!) and the current economic state are definitely coloring our generation’s view of the future. When we hear that 40-some% of college graduates will unemployed our underemployed a year after graduation, and we look at the violence in the Middle East, it’s very hard to take a rosy view of the world. I know that I’m not expecting a brighter world when I graduate, either.
So I don’t think dystopia is out of place in Christian Speculative Fiction. In fact, I think we could argue that it’s part of painting the world as it really is. However, I think it’s important that we still manage to incorporate the hope that our faith gives us into the story world. We need to show that, yes, humans being are corruptible and can really mess up the world, but the world is under God’s care, and the final ending is in His perfect hands and out of human control. How this would be best worked into a plot, however, I’m not sure.
It makes me think of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Granduer” (from 1877) where he describes a world “bleared and smeared with toil” yet the “Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.” (Can you tell I’m an English major?) Anyway, if I were going to sum up my view on this subject, that poem probably says it best.
I almost always take a historical view on the future. Things will be very bleak in the future, because that’s what occurs cyclically and will continue to occur cyclically until the end. Dystopia is almost a guarantee because we’re too stupid to avoid it.
About Star Trek–yes, the series changes, and I would say it gets more complex and less black and white. This may be related, not just to the worldview of the creators, but also to their respective personality types. I wonder, though, how much worldview is related to personality type. Why are some people generally more positive than others? Why are some Christians positive, while others are negative (I fall in the negative category). It’s as if I’ve been hardwired that way. Perhaps that’s also why I consider my Star Trek counterpart to be Data rather than Spock, although my husband says I’m only allowed to choose from the original series. Do you think that’s fair?
That’s also something I was thinking about, Jill– things fall apart all the time. In a way (thought it’s often exaggerated) Western Culture has been through an end of the world scenario– think about the sacking of Rome (repeatedly) and the dissolution of the Empire that would prompt Augustine to write City of God. I mean, if I wrote you a novel about the years between 440 and 480, and I gave it to a Roman in the 300’s or even earlier, it would be a dystopian future to him. He might see it as the end of civilization… the great War to end all culture and learning and growth… people living in ruined old houses in a ruined old city that used to be majestic and powerful… technology lost and broken…
Doesn’t that sound a lot like Fallout or Mad Max or something? But it also sounds like what happened in Mexico to the Maya and to the Romans.
I got so distracted while watching this…but a lot of good questions.
Now I really want to go write a story about Hell….