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Tim Robbins to Star in Upcoming Apple TV+ Dystopian Series 'Wool'
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200 years give or take. We are already seeing unprecedented damage to our ecosystem that is accelerating in a logarithmic curve. Even if all warming emissions stopped today (which they won’t) it’s likely far too late.
How about in the year 2022, Australian scientists based in Antartica, commissioned by Australia's Department Of Defence, working on an airborne vaccine for COVID results in a mutated Z-Virus which radially spreads around the globe when the first summer flight out leaves the base. Can call the series, 'The Zulu Strain'. One of the Norwegian scientists that safely escapes back to Norway is attempting to turn the tide on this new zombie virus.
I don't get these types of reactions. A premise is a far cry from the story line.
Just go to Twitter and you can experience all that now, virtually.
If you want this sort of dystopia read John Brunner: _The Sheep Look Up_ and _Stand on Zanzibar_
Not only are they written in an interesting way that will make you work harder to understand them, they are utterly fascinating as examples of the early 1970s cultural atmosphere. Like all science fiction they are more about their time than about the nominal future, so we have an over polluted or over crowded earth, but over polluted and over crowded in very 70s ways, with 70's extrapolation technology and cultural trends.
I first read these when I was a young teen, maybe 1980 or so. When I re-read them about a year ago, I was amazed at how much had stuck -- not just the story and the imagery, but much of the language and precise details. That's when an author know's he's written something that works -- when it sticks in the head of a kid for 40+ years who has read many many books!
Honestly I find these older works much more interesting because they describe such a different world. Pick up ye average dystopia today and, my god, from the cover you just know the main themes, and how it will insist on a particular view of society and humanity's place in the universe -- totally predictable.
If that's your thing, read Ada Palmer's tetralogy starting with _Too Like the Lightning_.
It starts off apparently like a political correctness novel gone mad, full of rants about the sexist nature of language and how that's all been fixed by 2400, how much better people are, blah blah. And we appear to be in some sort of utopia.
And yet it's something else, something very different, but I still don't know exactly what. Is it a Straussian text where you have to read between the lines? A "be careful what you wish for"? A metaphor for the role of science in the story of humanity (ie is the child Bridger "science"?). Is it going to turn out to be about how humanity needs religion? About how society cannot persist without shared myths, even if those myths are lies?
All these questions (the fourth and supposedly last volume is due next month) make my point -- get past the first 100 pages or so and your initial irritation at "OMG, not ANOTHER of these types of books" and you find yourself in a different world, and one where you have no idea WHAT the author's agenda is.
Which is, I presume, much of what you want from such a book
I think his point is something different.
As I said above, most science fiction is about the concerns of today, only moved to the future. This makes it very predictable in the sense that I know the concerns of today because I am not dead. And predictable is the same thing as very boring.
Something different means a book with different concerns from the newspapers and tweets of say the past 10 years.
- This might be an author from a different culture, eg The Three-Body Problem.
- It might be an author from the past, eg 60s Heinlein or my recommendation of 70s John Brunner.
- It might be an author with idiosyncratic concerns, like Ken MacLeod who's something like a weird 70s full-bore marxist running on a totally different, orthogonal, track from leftism as woke.
- Or it might be a weird original mind like Iain M Banks who seems uninterested in the petty concerns of the rest of his society.
You would be amazed how much content exists. You do have the option to ignore the stuff that doesn't appeal to you...
I, for example, have never watched a single episode of Handmaid's Tale and don't intend to change that.
So, no, that's not what our entertainment options have boiled down to. There are infinitely many other options.
I'm not a fan of any of those genres, but Apple has Pachinko and Mr. Brain already, both are Korean dramas, and one is an adaptation of an anime series.
I believe both series are going to release in 2021 (think November/December, or early 2022).
I'm honestly not surprised. This is Apple to the T. If Apple puts out a product, it is the utmost of prestige and premium. That's why the dud shows that did come out on TV+ haven't been heard from again (Amazing Stories, Little Voice)