At this point, I think aliens would do a better job.
Nobody got this feeling from altered carbon? Immortal, immoral rich, and everyone else struggling to survive. I mean, it’s guilty-pleasure watching, but I am not ashamed.
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
This movie is eerily accurate despite being scathing satire. There’s more than a hint of truth in it. More like a mountain.
Gotta protect those bodily fluids boiz!
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.
Back to the Future 2 was pretty close
The techbrocalypse is a woefully underexplored dystopian future setting
I mean, you could replace Russian assets with Japanese elves and that’s basically Shadowrun. Ignore the fact there are also literal dragons and ancient gods as part of the conspiracy ring; that’s just an aesthetic and has no bearing on how they are basically just regular billionaires.
Sure, some did. But in those novels the same individuals were actually pretty smart.
That’s the difference.
There’s a big smart evil guy somewhere puppeting all these morons, right? Please god tell me there’s one smart guy doing all of this. It can’t be idiots the entire chain of command.
Transmetropolitan nails this.
Unfortunately for us as a civilization, the series has aged quite well.
Oh man Transmetropolitan, Judge Dredd, and some other deeply satirical stories like Harrison Bergeron have ended up being closer to reality than even the best attempts at dystopia: Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 (though its critique of what is essentially social media is on point), Minority Report (let’s see how AI in law enforcement goes…), Handmaid’s Tale…
I save a special spot for 1984 because our technology is spying on us, our governments and billionaires are using the media to manufacture consent, and the lies and danger around us make us not trust each other. 1984 did get pretty close, but 1984 was made with the assumption that our elites are competent and willing to work together and that does not seem to be the case actually. That’s our one saving grace and we need to act on it as soon as possible.
My God, how I miss Warren Ellis.
THIS. Where is the Transmetropolitan streaming series? The time has never been more right.
Handmaidens tale comes close tho
Idiocracy?
That government had the intelligence to see they needed to listen to someone smarter than them and gave Not Sure the freedom to do it how ever needed, even if it was something as ridiculous as water from the toilet. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Nah a lot worse. President Camacho was a good dude who had his peoples best interests at heart.
Not even!!! Nobody ever imagined such a horrible scenario
The last, uhh, 24 years keep reminding me of this line by Yeats:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
The Man in the High Castle comes close… or at least, makes it clear that it’s not as though the Nazis and Japanese occupying America would actually live by the code they dictate for others.
Season 4 of Lexx had all that and aliens.
Isn’t that Atlas Shrugged?
There was a Tom Clancy novel, either Sum of All Fears or Red Storm Rising, where the president and cabinet were a bunch of stupid fuckups that kept on making bad decisions taking us closer to World War 3.
