Reading Dystopia as an Act of Hope

Sci-fi hits different when you’re actually living in the times predicted in the pages of the great books. I’ve run into this twice recently: first with Fahrenheit 451 and Bradbury’s prophetic vision of a screen-obsessed culture that voluntarily gives up reading, and again this week as we revisit Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

Both Fahrenheit and Parable imagine the America of the early 21st century. Bradbury’s timeline is a little fuzzy, somewhere in the 2020s or 2030s, but Butler’s story opens in 2024 and runs through 2026. From 1951 and 1993, respectively, two people with little in common besides their love of science fiction looked at the world around them and cast into a future that would be defined by techno-fascism and climate change-driven collapse. It’s chilling stuff, and far too much of it has already come true: we are addicted to screens; our ability to pay deep attention is eroding; many of us are more connected to chatbots than we are to other humans; the world is indeed on fire.

But that’s not the whole story.

Dystopian fiction, particularly of the sort Bradbury and Butler wrote, isn’t about proving that we’re cooked. “We’re cooked” is intellectually lazy, and it only makes you more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking (read this book if you don’t believe me). The futures Bradbury and Butler imagined are terrifying, and yes, it is bracing to realize we are living in the kind of world some of our best writers envisioned as a worst-case scenario. But! Those worst-case scenarios are how their books begin, not how they end.

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Both Fahrenheit 451 and The Parable of the Sower open with portraits of a world in decline and proceed to tell stories about human connection, ingenuity, and personal sacrifice in service of the greater good. When the worst thing is already happening, the response our great writers imagined wasn’t, “We’re cooked,” but, to quote my president, Jed Bartlet, “What’s next?” Bradbury’s Guy Montag joins the rebel scholars as they turn to rebuild a city destroyed by war. Butler’s Lauren Olamina creates a new community built on radical acceptance of the fact that change is constant and insists that individuals from sharply disparate backgrounds how to work together for a common goal.

We may be living in the bad place, but it’s still up to us—not the tech moguls who misread the sci-fi classics—to turn it around. Don’t give up the ship. That’s the moral of the stories.