Dystopian Sci-Fi

I have been a fan of science fiction for most all of my life. As a youngster I gravitated toward comic books that had a sci-fi bent. These leanings may well have nudged me into a career in science, after college.

Most of the sci-fi that I was reading 50-60 years ago in high school and college were optimistic visions of a benevolent future. The focus was often on all the marvelous inventions we would enjoy, and how exciting they would make life. Isaac Asimov was one of my favorite authors. He had a bright outlook.

In the 1960s, Star Trek entered the SF world, with a TV series. Although many Star Trek episodes featured conflict and alien threats, the series offered us a future of hope—in that humanity will overcome its seemingly endless struggles with poverty, inequality, and wars. Star Trek pointed to a future where society's perennial problems had largely been resolved; thus it could feature a positive future, wherein historically intractable human demons were quelled.

More recent sci fi (over the last few decades), however, seems to be much more dystopian in its depiction. Many current writers appear to have been inspired by current pessimistic perspectives of the nature of human society. Today is not a time in which many of us look to the future with a cheerful attitude, as we once tended to, back in the 1950s. Colman McCarthy's novel The Road or the movie series “The Blade Runner” are good examples of current SF writers predicting some kind of “gloom and doom” future. It can be rather depressing.

Another example of dystopian SF is the novel—and later movie—Lord of the Flies. The book described—and the movie graphically portrayed—how a group of boys would devolve to a band of cut-throat monsters, in the aftermath of them having been shipwrecked on an island. Over time they turned feral, and became an isolated society of meanness toward each other. The book offered a gloomy view of how society's baser instincts would drag us down to a nasty existence—absent culture's moral teachings.

An opposing perspective on society's better nature was recently offered, however, by a true incident of boys being shipwrecked on an island. It is a story that belies the dystopian portrayal in Lord of the Flies. In this real case, a group of boys ended up on an island near Australia—and went on to form an equitable community, that was far more supportive of its members. When found a couple of years later, this band of real boys had instead formed a small society of tight-knit individuals who were kind to each other and were thriving.

Is this a case of reality being kinder than fiction? Is it possibly an example of a more accurate and benevolent portrayal of what our future might bring? Could we be a more charitable species than some of our contemporary futurists suggest?