Consuming dystopian science fiction has quickly become a popular coping mechanism for Americans trying to adapt to (or resist) the sometimes-dark reality of 2017. Immediately after the Trump inauguration and the White House’s embrace of “alternative facts,” George Orwell’s 1984 shot to the very top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Other dystopian classics—like Aldous Huxley’s 1932 portrait of a more comfortable but no less frightening future authoritarian regime, Brave New World, and Sinclair Lewis’ alternate history of a fascist America, 1935’s It Can’t Happen Here—also quickly hit the top 20.
This same impulse has helped make a hit out of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the first season of which is ending Wednesday. That show, based on the modern science-fiction novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, depicts a near-future in which a totalitarian theocracy has overthrown the U.S. government, and the few women who are still fertile in the wake of an environmental crisis have been forced to serve as “handmaids” to bear children for the regime’s elites. Read the article at Slate.
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Science fiction (often shortened to SF, sci-fi or scifi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life.
Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a “literature of ideas.” It usually avoids the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically, science-fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection is now limited to hard science fiction. Read more at Wikipedia.
