State police officers during a “Reopen Virginia” rally around Capitol Square in Richmond on April 22, 2020. Getty/Ryan M. Kelly / AFP Shauna Shames, Rutgers University and Amy Atchison, Valparaiso University Dystopian fiction is hot. Sales of George Orwell’s “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” have skyrocketed since 2016. Young adult dystopias – for example, Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger…
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By Beth Strano (April 27, 2020) This is also me seeing so many folks embracing gardens, new cooking skills, mutual aid, bartering, and mending as healthy ways to rebuild the feeling that we have some control over our lives. We were never lazy, we were living in a culture that demands so much of our time and energy to survive….
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By Joseph Orosco (March 24, 2020) Looking around for articles that highlighted speculative fiction responses to pandemics, I ran across this piece from Alan Yuhas from a few years ago. Yuhas mentions some obvious things such as Camus’s The Plague and The Walking Dead, etc, but what I found most interesting was a mention of Italian Renaissance writer Boccaccio and…
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By Joseph Orosco (November 6, 2019) We are entering into the thick of presidential electoral politics as the Democratic party narrows its contenders to take on Trump. There are pundits looking to see what can be learned about the mid-term elections of 2018 for creating a “Blue Wave,” and others wondering if the impeachment proceedings will lead to electoral turmoil…
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By Joseph Orosco (January 22, 2019) By now, a lot of people have heard the story of how Star Trek was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite TV show. It was, according to Nichelle Nichols, the only program he allowed his children to watch because it portrayed African Americans living in a future where they were treated equally and with dignity…
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By Joseph Orosco (November 5, 2018) The folks at Futurism Studios feel that we have become too entranced by dystopian stories about technology and political developments. These stories can be good as tales of caution, they say, but too much can nurture cynicism and nihilism. We need utopian stories to offer us hope: “So fiction — of the dystopian and…
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By Mark Rudd (August 29, 2017) I woke up at 2 am last night thinking: How can you talk about socialism in the US without taking into account two salient characteristics of this country’s history and present: racism and militarism? Obviously John Judis has no problem with this question, since he never mentions either. I love Scandinavian socialism as a…
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By Chris Lowe (August 28, 2017) Can intercultural gardens be an alternative to Confederate monuments to the past? A friend of mine observed that as the movement to remove or relocate Confederate monuments goes on, it will change spaces and create new spaces. The implication is that even while we work on this, we should also be thinking about what…
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By Joseph Orosco (August 10, 2017) Lots of people are noticing that our pop culture seems obsessed with apocalyptic and dystopia themes lately. Father of cyberpunk William Gibson thinks our narrative vision of the future is shrinking because we are focused on the end of the world tales. Brianna Rennix is concerned that the only people that seem to hold…
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By Joseph Orosco (July 12, 2017) Espen Hammer argues in the New York Times that we need to revive the utopian imagination in this era, fascinated by dystopian themes: “There are reasons, however, to think that a fully modern society cannot do without a utopian consciousness. To be modern is to be oriented toward the future. It is to be…
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As part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, the Anarres Project presented Dr. Randall Milstein (OSU Honors College and College of Science) discussing the cultural and technological impact the series has had on society and everday life. He discussed the ways in which Star Trek prefigured contemporary technology, as well as the way in which the…
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