Several Prometheus-winning authors \u2013 including Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451),\u00a0<\/em>Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here),<\/em>\u00a0George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four),<\/em>\u00a0Neal Stephenson\u00a0(The System of the World, Snow Crash)<\/em> and Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)<\/em> \u2013 are discussed with intriguing and incisive commentary in Ferguson’s recent article, \u201cHow Science Fiction Novels Read the Future.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here\u2019s how Ferguson\u2019s essay<\/a> begins:<\/p>\n \u201cThe pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural \u2014 perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two centuries, since Tambora in 1815? Or will it be a manmade calamity \u2014 nuclear war or a cyberattack? And might we inadvertently descend into a new form of AI-enabled totalitarianism in our efforts to ward off such calamities?<\/p>\n To all these potential disasters it is impossible to attach more than made-up probabilities. So what can we do about them? The best answer would be that we should strive to imagine them. For the past two centuries, this has been the role of science fiction,\u201d Ferguson writes.<\/p>\n Perhaps with some oversimplification, Ferguson views dystopias as \u201chistories of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis sounds like a contradiction in terms, but as they have always echoed present fears (or, to be more precise, the anxieties of the literary elite), they show us which worries of the past had a role in history,\u201d Ferguson writes.<\/p>\n \u201cAs Fahrenheit 451<\/em><\/a> author\u00a0Ray Bradbury once said: \u201cI am a preventer of futures, not a predictor of them.\u201d But how many policy decisions have been influenced by dystopian visions? And how often did these turn out to be wise ones?<\/p>\n \u201cThe 1930s policy of appeasement, for example, was based partly on an exaggerated fear that the Luftwaffe could match H.G. Wells\u2019s Martians in destroying London. More often, though, nightmarish visions have failed to persuade policymakers to act.\u201d<\/p>\n The article also mentions \u201clevels of state surveillance undreamed of by George Orwell<\/a>,\u201d a well-trod subject and sadly a frequent reference these days.<\/p>\n But Ferguson doesn\u2019t deny the more positive aspects of sf in inspiring better visions.<\/p>\n \u201cScience fiction has been a source of inspiration, too,\u201d he writes. Ferguson\u2019s essay also references several less-discussed writers and novelists whose dystopian fiction seems surprisingly relevant to today.<\/p>\n One of his earliest historical references is to Mary Shelley – not just her classic cautionary fable Frankenstein\u00a0<\/em>but especially her \u201cequally revolutionary\u201d 1826 novel The Last Man.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWith its vision of mass extinction following a plague and a depopulated world, it was the first truly dystopian novel,” Ferguson writes.<\/p>\n His essay also discusses a Prometheus Hall of Fame winner (Sinclair Lewis\u2019 It Can\u2019t Happen Here<\/a>)<\/em> and a Prometheus Best Novel finalist (Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale)<\/em> as good examples of dystopian fiction \u201cas much concerned with political catastrophe as with natural and technological disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe nightmare here is Stalin-like totalitarianism.,” he writes.<\/p>\n “Fahrenheit 451<\/em>\u00a0(published in 1953 but set in 1999) describes an illiberal America where books are banned and the job of firemen is to burn them.”<\/p>\n (Though the novel is sometimes interpreted as a critique of McCarthyism, Bradbury\u2019s real message was that the preference of ordinary people for the vacuous entertainment of TV and the willingness of religious minorities to demand censorship together posed a creeping threat to the book as a form for serious content.)\u201d<\/p>\n We, the 1994 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner<\/strong><\/p>\n Ferguson also makes apt comparisons between China\u2019s current surveillance-state, social-credit-controlled dictatorship with Yevgeny Zamyatin\u2019s early dystopian novel We,\u00a0<\/em>inducted in 1994 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. \u201cThe most famous prophets of surveillance states \u2014 Orwell and Huxley \u2014 have been outflanked when it comes to making sense of today\u2019s totalitarian states. Take China, which better resembles Yevgeny Zamyatin\u2019s <\/a>We:<\/em>\u00a0a book written in 1921 but suppressed by the Bolsheviks.<\/p>\n It is set in a future \u201cOne State\u201d led by \u201cthe Benefactor,\u201d where the \u201cciphers\u201d \u2014 who have numbers, not names, and wear standardized \u201cunifs\u201d \u2014 are under constant surveillance. All apartments are made of\u00a0glass, with curtains that can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex. Faced with insurrection, the omnipotent Benefactor orders the mass lobotomization of ciphers, as the only way to preserve universal happiness is to abolish the imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/strong><\/p>\n Perhaps the most intriguing insights in Ferguson\u2019s far-reaching essay are about how Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em> turned out to describe a more realistic dystopian future, with its softer forms of oligarchic social control, than Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four.<\/em><\/p>\n His essay, in fact, might inspire LFS members to consider nominating Huxley\u2019s more prescient dystopia for future Prometheus Hall of Fame consideration.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a remarkable letter written in October 1949, Aldous Huxley \u2014 who had been Orwell\u2019s French teacher at Eton \u2014 warned him that he was capturing his own present rather than the likely future. \u201cThe philosophy of the ruling minority in\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>,\u201d Huxley wrote, \u201cis a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion\u2026 Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in\u00a0Brave New World<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a rather grim conclusion, so I\u2019d rather end this blog by quoting one of Ferguson\u2019s more amusing comparisons:<\/p>\n \u201cIf, as Paul Samuelson joked, declines in US stock prices have correctly predicted nine of the last five American recessions, science fiction has correctly predicted nine of the last five technological breakthroughs.\u201d<\/p>\n Bio note: Ferguson, a Scottish historian based in the United States, is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of 16 books, including Civilization, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, The Great Degeneration<\/em>and The Ascent of Money.<\/em><\/p>\n * Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.<\/p>\n * Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n *\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital, and in some ways even more powerful than politics in the long run, by sparking innovation, better ideas, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights and differences.<\/p>\n Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread better visions of the future that help humanity overcome tyranny, slavery and war and achieve universal liberty and human rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How can science fiction be used to explore and perhaps take steps to prevent the darker possibilities of the future? Writer-historian Niall Ferguson examines the benefits and prophetic classics of science fiction in an intriguing essay in The Spectator magazine. Several Prometheus-winning authors \u2013 including Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451),\u00a0Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here),\u00a0George Orwell … Continue reading Science fiction\u2019s prophetic dystopias: Niall Ferguson Spectator essay sheds light on Prometheus winners Bradbury, Orwell, Stephenson and Zamyatin while drawing timely comparisons to Huxley<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,1585,1862,2204,2201],"tags":[815,529,641,59,967,588,1763,20,1757,629,268,68,966,1750,1758,200,813,911],"class_list":["post-5211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay","category-fiction-in-the-news","category-george-orwell","category-neal-stephenson","category-ray-bradbury","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-brave-new-world","tag-fahrenheit-451","tag-george-orwell","tag-it-cant-happen-here","tag-mary-shelley","tag-mccarthyism","tag-neal-stephenson","tag-niall-ferguson","tag-nineteen-eighty-four","tag-prometheus-hall-of-fame","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-sinclair-lewis","tag-snow-crash","tag-spectator-magazine","tag-stalin","tag-we","tag-yevgeny-zamyatin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-1m3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5211"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5255,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions\/5255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Yevgeny-We-200_.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
\n\u201cWhen Silicon Valley began thinking about how to use the internet, they turned to writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.<\/a> Today, no discussion of artificial intelligence is complete without reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, just as nearly all conversations about robotics include a mention of Philip K. Dick\u2019s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em> \u00a0or the movie it inspired, Blade Runner.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>“Huxley\u2019s Brave New World\u00a0<\/em>(1932) is a very different dystopia. Citizens submit to a caste system, conditioned to be content with physical pleasure. Self-medication (\u201csoma\u201d), constant entertainment (the \u201cfeelies\u201d), regular holidays and ubiquitous sexual titillation are the basis for mass compliance. Censorship and propaganda play a part, but overt coercion is rarely visible. The West today seems more Huxley than Orwell: a world more of corporate distraction than state brutality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n