Introducing a new feature in Nebula Magazine an editorial series byline, The Dystopian. Our columnist will appear monthly with notes about anything and everything Sci-fi from best authors to worst, fan works to fan fails and who’s running the fan pages that are on spot or off the rails. 

We promise The Dystopian will always be a good read and whether you like the feature or not we hope you’ll write to the editor, we love opinions. The Dystopian is the one place on the internet where Fans have a voice.

18 April, 2025

Tired of being right yet?

Yesterday the Defense Department announced it will be briefing the administration on a new proposal dubbed ‘Golden Dome’ a defense system similar to Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ that secures Israel from air attack with a system of ground based anti-missile weapons deployed as a cover against inbound projectiles. 

Golden Dome would however be a much more ambitious undertaking costing anywhere between $10 billion and several hundred billion depending on scope. At it’s most expensive and longest range application Golden Dome would include space based launch vehicles designed to intercept orbital drop, hypersonic weapons in mid flight by achieving hypersonic speeds combined with fully autonomous intercept capability made feasible by recent developments in the science of quantum AI…sound familiar?

In 1984 Hollywood director writer James Cameron introduced the world to ‘Skynet’ an AI concept to secure humanity from aggression in a world of advanced missile capabilities including orbital platforms dropping nuclear weapons on surface targets at will. 

Skynet however quickly achieved self awareness and determined that humanity itself was the enemy, declaring a war of total attrition and ultimately genocide against mankind. Was Cameron prescient or simply making an educated assumption regarding a futuristic scenario?

Science fiction authors have been making such prognostications since the earliest days of apocalyptic narrative beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel ‘We’ about the rise of Russian totalitarianism. Considered the father of the modern dystopian novel Zamyatin’s writings almost certainly inspired later writers and film makers like Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World - 1932 and The Handmaid’s Tale a distaff dystopian narrative by Margaret Atwood - 1985. All these stories have the same kernel narrative, the rise of totalitarianism with its concomitant degradation of the human condition; democracy’s decline initiated by the most subtle of initiatives wrought by an almost imperceptible change in the political order. 

Golden Dome may not be Skynet just yet but if the past is presage, it may well be coming now that AI driven algorithmic, corporate technology has begun to merge with political malfeasance.

The following is an incomplete yet very good list of dystopian works over the last 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_films 

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

Your letter may be chosen to publish a response, please provide a first name. Your contact information will not be made public.

                                          ____________________________

 

26 March, 2025

“One Man’s Utopia”

The Leader in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1921) is known as the Benefactor. Orwell acknowledges the influence of “We” on “1984” (1949), he reviewed it in ’46 and suggested it influenced “Brave New World” (1932) (BNW), which Huxley denied. 1984 had The Party aka Big Brother, BNW had the World Directors, “V for Vendetta” High Chancellor Sutler, “The Handmaid’s Tale” the Commander, “The Parable of the Sower” President Donner, and so on. They all demand “my way or the highway”. They all profess that they will usher in a Utopia, but they need to break a few eggs on the way.

I read recently that Totalitarianism is a modern form of the term Tyranny, as described in Aristotle’s Politics. Way back when, 4^th century BCE, he describes tyranny and oligarchy as evil forms of monarchy and aristocracy, rule by one and rule by a few, respectively. Totalitarianism uses modern technologies and utopian ideologies for a crueler, more pervasive and efficient form of tyranny.

We could bounce back and forth between history and speculative fiction, how the Greeks stopped Xerces, the King of Kings, to save democracy, or how The Foundation attempted to soften the fall of the Galactic Empire. Talk about Absolutism from the Renaissance to the Revolution, or listen to Sam Tarly explain why the Night King wanted to kill Bran to wipe out all memory of Westeros. But I’d like to ask about the mindset that wants to drown government in the bathtub. I’d like to ask what comes next?  

The Founding Fathers had a plan, while yes there was a war, which could have gone either way, but it ended in some semblance of the next phase in self-government. Whereas the French Revolution led to The Terror and Napoleon. Before we go past the LARP seen in the recent film “Civil War” and have at it in real life, we should step back and discuss the many thought experiments given to us in the last century.  Who can read “Fahrenheit  451” and advocate burning books? Then I’m reminded that it’s only treason if you lose the war. In an age of “endless” war how do you determine who’s treasonous? But I digress…

About twenty years ago, my daughter was assigned various books in high school that had to do with death. Novels and Shakespeare plays dealing with death and suicide, murder and even regicide. Our discussion led us to the conclusion that it was a form of inoculation. Likewise with dystopian fiction. I myself remember clearly wondering why in middle school we all were led into a special assembly to watch the animated film “Animal Farm”. It bothered me. Then we read 1984 and Brave New World in high school. What were they trying to teach us?  What did I learn at sixteen when I saw “Rollerball”?  What did I get out of Pink Floyd’s  “Mother should I trust the government?” at twenty? Out of John Hurt’s performance in “1984” in 1984 at twenty-six?

Why must we be constantly reminded? Why all the inoculations? Makes me wonder if book burners aren’t akin to anti-vaxers. If you read PKD’s “Man in the High Castle” does it generate psychological antibodies allowing us to recognize Nazism? To know it when we see it?  To paraphrase The Gospel of Thomas, “is fascism spread upon the Earth, but we do not see it”?  The virus mutates, and outbreaks occur. We must be ever vigilant. Recognize the symptoms. Develop new dystopian literature to immunize ourselves against the new strain. We must work toward eradication of this sickness in all it’s forms, least we suffer a pandemic that sends us back to the Dark Ages.

I thoroughly recommend Zamyatin’s “We”, especially the audiobook read by Toby Jones, et al.

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

Your letter may be chosen to publish a response, please provide a first name. Your contact information will not be made public.

____________________________

 

27 February, 2025

 

"They Finally Did It": Bias and Creative Output

Years ago, I edited a book for the first time. I was quite good at making sense of grammar and a champion speller, but knew that the writer also wanted assessments of the plot and characters.

 

 The book was a hero’s journey if heroism meant fulfilling a destiny to marry into a righteous family of superheroes. The in-laws quoted Reagan and the Bible and defeated liberals who were definitely the picture of scruffy anarchy.  I knew the politics of this author already, but the patriotic zealotry was unbearably heavy-handed.

With that in mind, I wrote her a note at the end of my edit:  “Your readers shouldn’t be able to tell who you voted for in every presidential election.”

Sometimes, personal perspectives date a work in unfortunate ways, but that does not make it the obligation of an author to remove them.  Quite the contrary.

In 2015, I went on a tour of Spanish Civil War sites in Barcelona and learned of George Orwell’s experience as a volunteer in that conflict. The guide included excerpts from his memoirs that showed his disillusionment and frustration at citizens choosing to turn on each other. I read 1984 in a new light the following year.

Similarly, I would have extracted very different meanings from  The Crucible if I hadn’t known about Arthur Miller’s denunciation as anti-American. I would not have looked at his  representation of the Salem Witch Trials and interpreted them as an indictment of McCarthyism.

Speculative fiction ventures beyond our current understanding and demands imagination of consequences.  Consider for a moment the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. After witnessing the devolution of humans and their subjugation by primates over 2000 years of history, astronaut Taylor goes in search of answers in the Forbidden Zone that was once a lush paradise. There, he finds the ruins of a structure, first visible only in parts. Falling to his knees, he says that “they finally did it.”  Then, screaming at the “maniacs” who destroyed this place, he damns generations of humans to hell. It is then that we see him collapsed in front of the Statue of Liberty. The wasteland that has doomed humanity is what remains of his home.

On the other hand, we have Interstellar, in which humanity survives because of the desperate actions of a father trying to reach his daughter across space and time. The film shows many instances of futility and failure, but persistence and the intangible ties that bind are the X factor.

Both of these examples do not create the story free from bias. It is the privilege of authors to use their own convictions to shape possibility and readers of the present can be taught by what possibilities we see.

 

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

Your letter may be chosen to publish a response, please provide a first name. Your contact information will not be made public.

____________________________

 

 

 

10 January, 2025

Brace yourselves, we may be lost to history

Perhaps it’s time we rethought Science Fiction, at least the purpose of it. At the current pace of technological change by the time an author pens a new story technology has likely already advanced either beyond the story’s magic or to a point that the narrative seems quaint.

Science fiction must then be more. I submit that in this year and at this time and place we have an opportunity to redefine science fiction and recognize the genre’s real nature that is to predict the future and not just the science or technology of the future but the social and political future. After all some of the best science fiction of the past have always been those stories that accurately envisioned mankind’s future: Things to Come, Destination Moon, 1984 to name but a few. 

How do we do this? Given the recent US election we can likely make an accurate assumption about American society in the near future, say twenty-five  years hence, one generation to the year 2050. It might begin something like this:

By 2025 The United States had witnessed the passing of most of the third generation to be born following WW2. The conflict that ended in the defeat of German aggression and halted the threat of a European dictatorship all but forgotten. By generation two, most children had lost sight of the purpose, the reality of WW2 and began to question the history—did the holocaust actually happen, who were the villains, who were the heroes? 

You might see where I’m going, just four generations into the future the United States may have become what we had fought to eradicate, America could well be a dictatorship because we failed to teach history, we began banning books and stopped foreign immigration. We ceased teaching our children lessons in civics and replaced those lessons with classism, racial separateness and sexual stereotyping. In 2024 just under three fifths or 90M eligible US voters took to the polls and a full forty-nine percent of all Americans now followed a cause, a trend, toward isolationism and conspiratorial mania.

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

Your letter may be chosen to publish a response, please provide a first name. Your contact information will not be made public.