Dystopias; Why are we so fascinated?

[Nick]

John Wyndham was a master of dystopian writing in the 50's with The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes.
I remember reading The Chrysalids in school and it's stuck with me to this day.

Aldous Huxley wrote of strange future worlds that we might not want to inhabit and even modern writers such as Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts do the same by creating events that change the world into a much darker place. Last month I picked up Darkest Days by Gallon and found his world creation very depressing and one I would want to avoid as much as possible (Yellowstone explodes, most of US uninhabitable, draconian laws, corruption, persecution and US trying to take over Africa).

Brendan DuBois has a good alternate Cuban Missile Disaster storyline with NYC being radioactively contaminated during WW3 and the political shenanigans of the resettlement. In Dead of Night (Twilight) we see the USA being policed by the United Nations after a nuclear attack wipes out all power and communications.

It's been a long time since I read any serious science fiction such as Ben Bova (oil runs out, city riots, Moon/Space our only hope).

But the question of why we like these stories is hard to answer. Personally I think we read these to reassure ourselves that we have a pretty good life already, that things could be much worse, that we could be running for our lives in a dangerous land and not just waiting for our trains to deliver us to the boring mundane reality of work.

[upnorth]

Have any of you ever read Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"? I'm not a big Margaret Atwood fan at all, but someone loaned me the book several years ago and pestered me into reading it. A rather disturbing dystopia in that one.

Basically its set in a nation that doesn't allow its citizens to leave and middle class families are getting ripped apart by the upper class, why? Well the upper class has an alarming number of childess couples.

Middle class women are systematically rounded up while middle class men are systematically killed. The women are tested for fertility and if they are fertile, they are put into forced sexual and reproductive servitude for the upper class, disturbingly they are conditioned to be proud of this duty.

I won't spoil it beyond that if you haven't read it, but it is probably one of the few Atwood books I might say was worth a read.

Its easier for me to say what dystopias I don't like rather than those I do. I absolutely loathe those that are put together so naively that they couldn't work in any timeline you put them in.

Case in point are any dystopias (and there are a few) that picture a world working better if women were the dominant sex and worse yet show women putting the world back together after men had destroyed it with war and such.

I've worked in companies run by women and that have the larger percentage of their executive made up of women. They don't work any better than companies with men at the controls. Not to go too socio political with this, from what I've seen women have a poorer grasp of the concept of "chain of command" and less respect for female superiors due to the "sisterhood" attitude that feminism bred. They have a great deal of difficulty seeing another woman as anything but a "sister" or equal and are a lot more apt to argue with a female authority figure.

In positions of power, women are every bit as susceptible to corrupt behavior, power tripping, back stabbing and gross abuse of power as men have ever been. To claim they would be any better at running a world is inexcusably naive. (O.K. rant off)

(Personally, I think Hillary just wanted the presidency so she could hire back Monica and show Bill how it was really done. )

[Aircav]

I looked up Dystopias on Wikipedia because I wasn't exactly sure of the meaning and it say's,
"A dystopia and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,[1] kakotopia or anti-utopia) is the vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia. A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution."
Sounds like the UK at the moment, but as to why its popular as a subject its just more interesting than a Utopian one would be but then again theres "Things To Come" which covers both.