Utopia v. Dystopia

This is a summarized version of today's post at Universo Anárquico. I know I should have gone to the beach.  How could I go to the beach after seeing this in the LATimes?  I never knew we had an Arlington West in Santa Monica.

Utopia and Dystopia go hand in hand.  A Utopia is a fantasy world in which everything is perfect. A dystopia is a society where things go wrong.  Utopia-dream/dystopia-nightmare.  Generally dystopias are placed in the future.

The most famous ones, for my generation, are:

• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.  A dystopia in which people are engineered genetically, there is no sex, but lots of soma, a feelgood drug.  Things go wrong when one Alpha whose mother was a runaway, and had sex,  goes ...

• Nineteen-eighty-four, by  George Orwell.  I saw the movie and many years later read the book.  In this dystopia everybody is in a permanent state of paranoia. There is a war nobody knows much about.  Big Brother is watching through the telly at all times.  Winston falls in love, uh-oh.  Doesn't this one sound familiar?

• Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which goes quite well with Truffaut's film.
Ray Bradbury explained how the first seed was planted when he was walking in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles.  The seed was a short story, The Pedestrian. I read it at age thirteen.  It is here:

The Pedestrian


I will write about the paranoid Phillip K. Dick, whose work Hollywood loves.

And then about William Gibson, the Cyberpunk creator, whose Neuromancer is coming up.

I'll be back!