Thursday Thirteen

Spoiler Alert: This discusses some of Amazon Prime's Fallout, in case you haven't seen all 8 episodes. I don't discuss it in great detail, but if you want to miss any talk of it all, there's your warning.

1. We finished watching Amazon Prime's series, Fallout, on Tuesday night. Fallout is based on a Bethesda video game and is set in the future, where the people who "mattered" in 2070 moved underground to live in vaults while whatever was left the world fended for itself. The story takes place 219 years later, so in the 2300 century.

2. The Wasteland, as the world above the vaults is called, is sandy, without much grass or trees, and lots of remnants of the former civilization still showing. Like many other pieces of dystopian literature and movies, Fallout shows the world after some sort of catastrophic war or bombing as being sandy, dry, covered in radiation, and full of strange animals (and humans) who have adapted to this manmade hellhole.

3. The basics of dystopian literature, movies, and video games make certain assumptions about things like:

• Economic challenges: There’s widespread poverty that the citizens must endure, or there are massive gaps in wealth that create a ruling class of elites and relegate everyone else to a life of scarcity and hardship.
• Environmental damage: Environmental devastation wreaks havoc on the lives and fates of the characters. This destruction might take the form of major weather events, like earthquakes or floods; climate change and its disastrous effects; or the ramifications of pollution, overpopulation, or disregard for the planet and its finite resources.
• Government influence: Typically, there’s either no government overseeing law, order, and civilization, or there’s a domineering government that operates a police state and controls and monitors the lives of all citizens.
• Loss of freedom or individual identity: A dystopian society often robs its citizens of their basic freedoms and/or individualism. It reduces them to sheep who must blindly follow the dictates of a tyrannical and unjust system.
• Propaganda: The existing power structure in a dystopia produces propaganda to keep the citizenry in line. Such propaganda might present a deceptive “everything is fine“ picture of life in order to control the population, or it might incite fear and terror and, thus, generate an excuse to engage in further domination and subjugation.
• Survival: The characters in a dystopian setting are in a fight to survive the oppressive conditions in which they find themselves. They must resort to extreme measures to protect themselves and those around them, which usually means rebelling against the powers that be.
• Technology: Advancements in technology tend to play a key role in controlling or tracking the citizens of a dystopia. Rather than solving problems, technology creates them—damaging relationships, reinforcing hierarchies and power structures, and reducing quality of life.

(If you're paying attention, you might see signs of dystopian society in some of today's events, particularly where it concerns environment, government, propaganda, and technology. I suspect it is why there is more dystopian literature than utopian literature. It's not hard to look around and despair; it is much harder to look around and find hope and love.)

4. I have never played the Fallout video game series all the way through; I have Fallout 4, but I didn't like it. My glasses are too rose-colored, I suppose, to spend the hours required to play that video game. It was not visually pleasing, in other words. 

I have, however, read many dystopian books.

5. One of the first pieces of dystopian literature that I remember reading was Alas Babylon, by Pat Frank. Written in 1959, this book lays out how someone would survive a nuclear crisis in the US after the bombs fell. Of course, this book is older and so it doesn't have many of the technology components a similar book today might have, such as computers and cell phones, but it explored basic survival and outlined the loss of the US government, the devaluation of money (something like sugar and/or salt becomes a more valuable commodity), and tribalism as communities either came together or tore themselves asunder. The book still holds up as it is based on incidents in the Middle East as the ignition for the nuclear war.

6. Another book that had a big impact on me was A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr., also written in 1959. (That must've been a big year for concerns about the future of mankind, as things are now.) The book tracks not one person but technological advances (at a monastery, of all places) through thousands of years, until we blow ourselves up again. In other words, the book takes place after we've blown ourselves up the first time, and the monks have dedicated themselves to saving books and other knowledge because the people who survived the apocalyptic carnage were anti-knowledge, anti-books, and anti-society for a very long time. But human progresses, as it seems to do, and apparently we cannot overcome our demons in favor of our better selves.

7. Margaret Atwood has given us two popular pieces of dystopian literature: A Handmaid's Tale, which is frequently referenced at this time as women lose their reproductive and other basic freedoms, and the Oryx & Crake books, also known as the MaddAddam trilolgy which is not referenced but which, like Fallout, presupposes that the wealthy will make out much better than the rest of us poor sots when something happens. In the trilogy, it is not nuclear war that takes out much of humanity, and creates a different sort of world, but a virus.

8. One of the scariest pieces of dystopian literature I have ever read is A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. I read it in college, and we watched the movie, too, and it gave me nightmares for months. This book is about a gang of teenagers who terrorize their communities. This book and subsequent movie were full of sexual assault scenes and graphic violence. Like Alas Babylon, it was written before I was born, in 1962, and reflects the Cold War hype and propaganda people were living under at that time.

9. We've moved past the year 1984, but the book of the same name by George Orwell is still relevant and quite dystopian. In this book, humanity has moved onward technologically, and people lose their agency to Big Brother, who oversees their every move and even their thoughts. The government in 1984 is a totalitarian one, which means no individual freedom, the authority of the state/government is absolute, there are no political parties (or elections, or democracy, or any of the things some Americans and other people cherish) and that authority/government controls everything a person does. At least it's not all sand and there is grass and trees.

10. The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is another dystopian book, albeit one that offers nicer surroundings than Fallout. In The Giver, people live in an authoritarian-type of society. The authorities determine who will work in what job, and how the people will live. The book centers around a young boy who takes exception to this lifestyle. However, for the most part, people are portrayed as content in their surroundings and with their work, which is tailored to their skill and intelligence levels. Perhaps this is more a meritocracy run by authoritarian types. This book won the Newberry Award in 1994. It was made into a movie in 2014.

11. Another version of a post-apocalyptic world can be found in The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Published in 2008, the book trilogy follows the tale of Katniss as she first works in one of the poorer lands left over after war, and then participates in the "death games" put on to entertain the more entitled masses in the capital city. She eventually leads an insurrection against the tyrannical government that supports the death games. Bad government seems to lead to all sorts of problems, doesn't it?

12.  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, written in 1953, follows a fireman whose job is to burn books, not put out fires. Because of the censorship of books, this future society has increased interest in technology and entertainment—and an inability to think freely and creatively. Once again, government control is the problem in this dystopian future.

13. And finally, I'll mention some dystopian movies: the Mad Max movies in the 1980s (more sand), Blade Runner, The Matrix movies at the turn of the century (technology issues), Logan's Run (1976), Wall-E in 2008 (climate issues), and the Planet of the Apes movies (1970s and remakes). There are many, many more that I haven't seen.

As oppressive regimes across the globe work to control their populations—and we see our own government in the U.S. putting kids in cages and eroding privacies and rights we’ve taken for granted—we glimpse where we may be headed. It's no wonder dystopian fiction far outweighs utopian stories, because in reality, most of us never have our happy ever-after.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 858th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.