You have already read Orwell’s 1984, his vision of an oppressive and infantilizing communist. You’ve skimmed through Huxley’s Brave New World, a depressing depiction of a uniform, psychotropic future. You think you’ve done the trick?
Science fiction can be political and often is. Yannick Rumpala presents this aspect in a text that shows the interest of moving through anticipation or science fiction to confront the failings and threats of the present world . After all, we can also say to ourselves that the slightest foresight or anticipation is political since it draws up an agenda of what can happen, for good or for bad.
Here are two books that start from anticipation or a form of science fiction to better highlight the present. It is not a question here of exploring the nature of the consequences of science and technology but of starting from a political questioning to describe the meanders of a current situation by the anticipation of what it could become.
You can also read a very good article from the magazine Usbek et Rica which gives an idea of what literature can be in a totalitarian regime
Loic Aloiso makes a striking portrait, starting from the Chinese science fiction literature, of these tug-of-war between a science fiction of edification and a science fiction which poses new problems and sometimes manages to be critical, as with Liu Cixin (author of the three-body problem published by Babel – Actes Sud).
Finally, a discovery, at least for the writer of this article, Skinner, the behaviorist psychologist, has taken on the exercise of utopia from the point of view of behavioral rationalization, imagining what utopia could become by basing social rules on those of behavioral psychology. The novel, for it is a novel, was published in 1948 and bears the clear and evocative title of Walden Two.
