h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This URL moderation thing is getting a bit annoying.

manolan - I'm half-Chinese, so please put that into your mental image. Not very tall, either. Very small feet. There - that'll do.

Back to the dystopias - does anyone know who wrote the original novel "Logan's Run"? Whilst a rather dated film, the ideas behind it are classic dystopia. On that note, "Westworld" and its sequel "Futureworld" - both rather entertaining films but with some food for thought behind them. Now that we have actually made cyborgs (albeit with a lamprey's brain that dies after three days), these are issues we will inevitably have to return to.

I had the whole oriental thing in there, but no idea how and it wasn't as specific as that. Must have picked it up somewhere. Actually it really doesn't matter what anyone looks like in RL. And in some ways it's better not to know. Mental images don't have to have anything to do with the real thing, they're just a mental tool.

Logan's Run was written by William F Nolan (I knew that, wonder why , but I had to check Amazon to get the co-author) and George Clayton Johnson. There was a series of books, which I never knew. I wonder if they're any good.

My fundamental problem with 'Westworld' is a purely technological one. The guns have a special gadget which stops them firing at a human. Odd way to implement it (why not just make them lasers), but OK, I can accept it. There's still the risk of accidental death from ricochets and people moving into the path of a bullet. But what about mediaeval world? How do they stop someone getting sliced open with a sword?

That said, the implications of creating 'life' are huge and they do start to be addressed by the films. If you create 'life', can you control what it does? Should you? It comes back to the question of whether we should do a thing just because we can. This is similar to the issue addressed in Jurassic Park (more in the book than the film, I think) - not a dystopia, but one more OT subject won't matter here. In JP, there is an additional point stated explicitly, which is of course present in WW: if you create a sufficiently complex system (and 'life' is certainly complex), then predicting all the outcomes beomes impossible as you don't understand all the variables. Crichton dressed this up with the trappings of Chaos Theory because that was big when JP was written, but I think it is a rather more fundamental scientific issue than that.

This reminds me of the conversation elsewhere about whether GM food is safe and whether feeding sheep carcases to herbivores was _bound_ to cause problems. In these cases the systems are complex (living) and evaluating all the outcomes is only possible if you know all the variables. Do you? Do we? Do they? I don't know.

Of course, this kind of anti-technological rhetoric is a fairly recent thing (well, I think so). I'm not a student of history, so this may well all be a complete crock, and it is certainly a simplification, but....

Before WWII, science was generally seen as a 'good thing', to use Sellars's and Yeatman's favourite expression. Continued scientific advances led to a general improvement in living standards in the West. Sure, there were critics. People complained that the industrialisation of the 19th century ruined the countryside, changed the nature of people's jobs and led to overcrowding and disease in cities. But these seem to be isolated voices. The population as a whole took advantage of the benefits. Government scientists (and government in general) were respected. In fact, government scientists were a powerful political weapon: if they said that this new advance was 'good', then people generally believed them.

Then at some stage, perhaps inspired by Hiroshima and the Cold War, perhaps in the 60s, as 'flower power' and the hippy movement gained sway, general attitudes began to change. And I'm guessing at the origins. It wasn't like there was a sudden change, but even though the hippy movement was quite a small thing, many of its attitudes have been adopted generally. People stopped trusting government and government scientists. Scientific advance wasn't necessarily a 'good thing'. Instead, 'small is beautiful' and 'organic' attitudes have begun to take centre-stage.

What's my point? Well, there isn't one really, but I wonder at the role of dystopias in this change of attitude towards government. Dystopias have been around for a long time, but are the more recent ones symptoms of this change, or motivators? Is it any coincidence that technology is often a key weapon of the oppressive regime (although perhaps not in THT)?

Hello,

Well, what amazed me about Westworld is that they spent so much effort on the guns, but nobody could design the doors for the control room properly in case of emergency.

Interesting ideas, manolan. I have another little twist of my own to add. I think the skepticism towards science began earlier. Modernism was the follow-up to the Enlightenment, and its premise that we could do anything with a rational approach to the future. The Industrial Revolution was seen as one of humanity's triumphs. But then we hit WW1, economic depression, WW2, and suddenly modernism's boasts were seen as rather empty (as my girlfriend's prof in college overdramatically declared, "God died in Europe after World War I"). Thus was Postmodernism and a skepticism towards technology born. We still kept the naivete here in the USA until the 60s, but the combination of legalized segregation, Vietnam, and environmental pollution soon eroded the faith that we knew all the answers.

Just a few thoughts of my own. And I got to drop the PoMo word. Bonus score!

Yours,
Jake

Yeah. You used it in context, too, which probably gets you a triple word score or something!

Hello,

What's interesting is that the first Utopia is from Thomas More in 1516 (before that, only God was assumed to be able to create a perfect society). It and others that followed shaped the Enlightenment that followed. This century has been a big one for dystopian novels. I think manolan's point is rather astute. Cross that through the S in Postmodernism for 30 more points!

Yours,
Jake

Which S?

On the Utopia front - the reason Thomas More's is the first is because he coined the phrase in this context. Interestingly enough, it advocates some degree of equality between men and women - a man before his time...

I think the reason the 20th, and to a lesser degree 19th, centuries became a hotbed for the dystopia was because we were, and continue to be walking in a technologically uncertain age. When the commercial sewing machine came into use in the 1860s (I think), tailors came in on masse to smash the things out of fear. To flog a dead horse (no pun intended - if there was, I'd have said "dead cow"), the whole BSE business is comparable, as well as GM, etc. - we have no real idea of the consequences of our actions, and so authors feel obliged to speculate.

Funnily enough, just before he died, Aldous Huxley wrote both "Brave New World Revisited" and "Island", an utopia. Maybe he felt bad about leaving us all in a state of total paranoia.

Hello,

I don't know, I seem to recall that More was also pretty radical in that he suggested utopias could be created by design instead of being instead a state of innocence and such mandated by nature or God. Of course, I still get a kick out the fact that utopias and dystopias are pretty similar in that nobody is ever allowed to leave. And reading how Thomas More was executed was a grisly end to that state of bemusement.

It's true, we are in a technologically uncertain age, but I think it's been tough for us to come to grips with it. We've been engrained so much with the idea of our inevitable progress onwards and upwards, that it's always a bit daunting to see where we've screwed up. And we've screwed up in a lot of places this last century... The real kicker, is that we can't really wait to see what the final consequences are. We're making large-scale social experiments, and we don't really know what the outcome will be. It's a rather stark contrast to the planned glory of the utopias of yesteryear.

Anyway, how did we get on to this topic? Shouldn't we be discussing mental images in underwear? I wonder if manolan actually ever imagines anyone in their underwear. It's a good way to not feel intimidated apparently, not that I think anybody here is intimidating. And Emily, aren't you up rather late for a school night?

Yours,
Jake

Hello,

One more thing. The New York Public Library had a fascinating exhibit on the history of utopias last year. You can check out their website at [url removed by moderator], the subdir is /utopia/ . Sorry for being so abstruse (another bonus score!), but I have to do this to get around the dystopian automatic URL removal software.

Yours,
Jake

Did you know: Utopia actually means 'nowhere place' (I think - IIRC ) as More wanted to convey the idea that an actual 'utopian' society would be impossible to create.

Yes, you're absolutely right. The derivation is from the Greek 'ou' (not) and 'topos' (place). Many people think it is a corruption of 'eu' (good) 'topos', but this was not More's intention.

I suppose I have to answer the underwear question. I tried to explain before: these mental images are not well-formed. They don't necessarily have defined clothes, unless there is something specifically relevant or known. Sorry to disappoint. Of course, Emily will now forever be imagined wearing her 36DD matronly bra, as it has become relevant

The idea of imagining people in their underwear is often quoted as a way of dealing with intimidating situations, but I've never tried it. There's a similar one in The Crow Road by Iain Banks: try imagining the object of your affection/lust/obsession (delete as appropriate) on the toilet and see if you still find them desirable. If you do, that's true love, apparently!

Hello,

Well, I think there was a recent Red Dwarf where Kryten was told to imagine people on the toilet to be less intimidated... I don't know, I don't think it really works for me.

Yours,
Jake

Mr. Cogito - I'll have you know, I don't officially go back to school until Wednesday. Though I did have to go in today for orchestra. First time I've got Sebastian out for over a month. Anyway, I'm usually up late; I start to wake up at about 2.30pm on average (embarrassing in double history lessons).

As for my English coursework (4500 words - on dystopias, naturally ), I had 5 hours sleep in three days...

Hello,

Okay, I'm not playing truant officer, just being silly. I'm sorry to hear how little sleep you've been getting though. I certainly remember some sleepless nights when I was in University, and I don't really miss that.

Yours,
Jake

I know...

Nah... I've been exploiting the sleep value of myEaster holidays.

Hello,

Yeah, the one thing I do miss the school are the aimless holidays when I didn't have as much to do (especially after exams). Two weeks of all sorts of undirected activities.

Yours,
Jake

Hello,

So it seems there's a remake of "Rollerball" in the works for this summer. Sigh...

Yours,
Jake

really?

Yes,

It used to be that they would only remake the good films. Now they remake the bad films as well. Heaven forbid they come up with any new ideas...

Yours,
Jake

you shouldn't expect miracles