One truly has to wonder if the fucking boom of dystopias for a while now can’t help but reinforce capitalist realism and our limited imagination in thinking ways of fundamentally challenging and changing our world

Are they useful? Sure. But all the more I wonder how much so, they give us tools to interpret our present, but is that literally all we can do? Sure, corporate dystopia, climate apocalypse... so what? That’s basically the present.

Dystopias most of the time don’t, although some do, and they could, challenge that existing order. These are the ones I find more interesting and useful honestly, because they end up sustaining that no, this is not the end and dystopias will fall (present one included)

Still. Is that the only way to imagine our future? Via devastating systems or greater problems escalated to the nth degree?

What about picturing a new world? By comparison, continuity or invention, can we not dream and write other alternatives?

Sure we can. And people do! But the main publications (I’m spiteful with the Brazilian market, don’t mind me) and the ones of greater prestige draw attention do the dystopias.

What of the utopia then? Is it dead?

Hell no. But it feels like it is being killed off, or attempted to. In the 1970s, with Le Guin, Joana Russ, Marge Piercy and others, you had what was conceptualised as the “Critical Utopia”

Not a blueprint of a perfect society.

But a better, different society. An alternative if you will, and one that is also riled with issues and contradictions.

And even better, it has Hope as a key element, and as we face the present in horror and fury, this seems more even more relevant!

We are, amongst many things, faced with the decay and horror of late capitalism, with all its fascist tones and the destruction of massive proportions.

Beyond confronting, we need to also build, even fictionally, what we aspire to do, where we want to get.

Dystopias are still on the up and up. And I find that it’s a problem. That it does more harm than good, by fostering only more explicit visions of destruction and pain. Good? Yes. But it is a problem that it is as big as it is.

It replicates capitalist realism quite easily