What's the Role of Fiction in Social Change?
By: Aline Müller
Tags: Essay, Science Fiction, Writing, Society, Fiction Writing

We all love a good apocalyptical story. When I was a teenager, I used to love the comic book Tank Girl. Set in a post-apocalyptical world where water was scarce, Tank girl fought together with mutant kangaroos against the Water & Power Corporation.

In the "apocalyptic" genre, we have major pieces of work picturing the absurd structures and technologies we create. They show how high the stakes are if we don’t take care of our reality. Apart from big explosions and heroic scenes, sci-fi and the like bring about social criticism, delivering a digestible bite of reflection on the crazy world we have created. Published 70 years ago, 1984 is a great example of reflection coming from fiction. It's a piece that we, who were born before the 90’s, got exposed to long before cable internet existed. Up until today, it is impossible to talk about it without comments on the impact of government surveillance on free will or making a parallel to what is happening in society today.

On the other hand, take Blade Runner 2049. Besides the beautiful images and engaging plot, as most sci-fi goes, it also poses important social criticisms and a sad perspective of what the (not so far) future could hold. Implications of the technology we are building on the environment and society are something we can no longer ignore. Moral issues in genetic engineering, corporate power, consumer culture, they are all there. Yet, we barely talk about these things in conjunction with the film. These are only pieces that make the story exciting. Like nice furniture in a living room.

We are now so bombarded with entertainment and embedded in a consumer culture that our capacity to analyze seems to have changed tremendously. All we see in Blade Runner 2049 is a great piece of entertainment. Together with the Netflix & chill phenomena, it seems as if fiction has been losing its ability to make us question, review beliefs and set actions (that is, if we believe that fiction ever had such potential). If anything, fiction seems to be a coping mechanism, to relax after our workday.

Dream, baby, dream

It’s not only that we reduce great works of art to space-out-of-reality couch entertainment. My issue is how we have come to over-romanticize everything, and normalize the apocalypse. The fight is lost even before it has began.

Going to Mars to save our lives becomes a reachable dream while stopping plastic consumption and changing our eating behaviors to save our planet a big fat annoyance. Quite a few friends have told me that they are fascinated by the sky and the potential of SpaceX but that they are terrified to death of what is under our oceans and of seeing Blue Planet II. That is, after all, the point of romanticizing something: not caring about what we have and dreaming of what we might never have. Dreaming doesn’t require much energy anyway, whereas maintaining and improving our situation does.

Tired of our 9–5 jobs and defeated by our dreams not coming true, we watch fiction, fantasizing to be the main character. In an apocalyptic scenario, sure, we could totally be Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049. In this romantic view, we have a central role. We kill people, we have power. The thing is…. of all the 7,4 billion people in this world, are you and I really the ones for the job? If this was war, chances are that you and I would be a mere casualty on the street, shot on the head when we were fighting for a few coins to get water while someone else (a lot stronger, more important, with better contacts and more money) looked for replicants and killed us instead.

“You are not Denzel,” repeats Chris D’Elia on his show Man on Fire on Netflix over and over again. His constant cry is a reminder of the absurd situation we find ourselves.

As I was growing up, films like The Matrix, Fight Club and Avatar triggered people around me, bringing up questions about the broken society we have built, and our distorted relationship with nature. Maybe we did not do anything serious about these questionings, anyway. When Black Mirror was launched, we were impressed by the harsh critics and what the future could entail, but we were sure we would never get to any of those social absurdities. Now officers have to fight with people who, instead of helping a teenager, film him drowning.

Where do we go from here?

We don’t create things from nowhere, we imagine them first and then we work on it. Fiction is a rich pot of concrete technological developments and images to take inspiration from. What happens when we can’t either write about a better world, nor stop to analyze the sublots of apocalyptic stories? We create a dreadful narrative that is going to be normalized. In a world with so much content and overwhelming busyness, who has time and willingness to think critically about the film they watched and make a parallel to their lives? If we are awake by the time the film finishes, we will probably just consume another piece of content.

When chaos is normalized, everything is just entertainment to forget a hard day’s work, and Netflix sees our time sleeping as a competition, the only thing that is clear is that if there is ever going to be a revolution it is not going to be consumer-led.

But not everything is shit. What brings me hope is the fact that most of us want to be the hero in the movie, not the villain. That points to the existence of something inside us that wants to be more than we are, that wants to act, do something for the common good. The question is, how do we wake it up, how does the voice go from a whisper to a shout?

Yes, it is a big role, where no one is to blame and yet everyone is responsible. In the era of endless bread and circuses, I see that content creators could be more aware of their role in creating narratives. Create stories set in utopias where we would actually like to live, help society visualize a different future. Otherwise, we are doomed to live a life of bread and circuses, if we are not yet.