In a recent episode of Silo, an Apple TV+ sci-fi series, a character who doesn’t have long to live dons a virtual reality headset. She has spent her entire life in an underground bunker, which descends more than a mile into the ground like an upside-down skyscraper. What you see in the headset is downright alien: the cloud forests of Costa Rica, recorded last year in 2018. We never see the red-eyed tree frog and iridescent birds appear on its screen; Instead, we watch her reach out and close her fingers over the empty space. “Very beautiful,” she says. Then she points to us, the people of the twenty-first century: “How did they lose this world?”
The post-apocalyptic story is like a murder mystery in which the victim is life as we know it — “not the murder but how it happened,” says Jill Lepore. books In this magazine in 2017. Often, artifacts from our time serve as clues about what went wrong. In the first season of Silo, released in 2023, a series of doomed characters encounter “relics” that threaten to reveal dark truths about the origins of their underground shelter, and about what came before. They can’t figure out the purpose of the prehistoric Pez dispenser, but they can use Silo’s old computers to read files on a 20th century hard drive. A book called Amazing Adventures in Georgia, which may be set in Atlantis, includes images of long-lost animals, forests, and a beach at twilight.
In the “silo” ten thousand people live on one hundred and forty-four underground floors, connected to each other by a huge spiral staircase. Working-class mechanics have been sent to the “deep”, where they maintain a huge generator that, among other things, powers crop lights. An administrative class, led by the city’s mayor, a judge, a sheriff, and the head of the IT department, lives at the “top.” The only view of the outside comes from a camera mounted above the ground, showing a deserted hillside, some leafless trees, and the bodies of the people who left the silo. The worst punishment in society is “cleaning out”, where you are sent through the air lock to remove dust from the camera lens, and then die from whatever pollutes the air.
“Silo” follows a classic dystopian structure: forbidden knowledge launches the hero’s quest for more forbidden knowledge, which may lead to triumph or tragedy. Hero of George Orwell’s novel1984“He is a bureaucrat whose discovery of a blank diary leads to a coup against his government; the hero of Ray Bradbury’s film”Fahrenheit 451” is a professional book copyist who begins stealing books. In “The Silo,” as in these previous works, powerful people act ruthlessly to keep secrets secret. But a stubborn engineer named Juliet Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) is unexpectedly promoted to sheriff and begins… In the investigation, “How did they lose this world?” is the question that drives the entire show, and indeed the entire genre.
One of the perverse pleasures of dystopia is that we identify with its truth-seeking inhabitants as they try to figure out who destroyed their world — and, at the same time, feel like we might have done it. The desolation outside the silo evokes the everyday terror of our time: Just a few years ago, governments ordered their citizens to shelter in place for fear of a new virus, and as I write this, many Los Angeles residents have fled their homes in the face of wildfires or stayed inside to avoid the smoke. Ironically, post-apocalyptic stories can be comforting: at least in the present day they are not Which bad. On the other hand, we may be drawn to dystopia because we fear we are living in it.
During President Trump’s first year in office, such stories became so popular that Lepore’s essay declared a “golden age of dystopian fiction.” (The term “dystopian,” which once referred to a utopia gone wrong, has also become more diverse; in 2023, Merriam-Webster notes that it has been applied to the smoke of wildfires, the dangers of artificial intelligence, and Republican predictions about the future of San Francisco.) As we approach the final bad sequel, a second Trump administration, and a post-apocalyptic drama marked by pandemics (“The last of us“”Station eleven“), environmental disaster (“snow piercer”, “the end“), and the erosion of reproductive rights (“The Handmaid’s Tale“”Furiosa“) continued to circulate. Much of it draws on decades-old source material that has taken on new relevance. When such works succeed, they are often described as “prophetic” or “prophetic,” as if their creators saw the future and described it in art; when Whether it’s harsh or makes you want to look away, you could describe it as “too real” but a better indicator of a dystopia’s success may be that its world is both strange and unsettlingly plausible at the same time.
The world of “Silo” is mostly composed, though it occasionally defies physics (at one point, Juliet falls hundreds of feet and survives) and linguistics (Ferguson’s annoying Swedish accent is one of the few flaws in her performance). the books The series on which it is based, published by science fiction writer Hugh Howey, starting in 2011, is also based on the questionable theory that history is not only cyclical but centrally planned, through written rules. As Season 2 continues, this idea distorts the plot in ways that strain credulity, and the series’ myriad cliffhangers mar the narrative with artificial tension. However, the silo is an innovative and fun environment, rendered in a retro-futuristic mid-century style that offsets the gloom. The subtleties of underground life, unpackaged so that each answer raises another question, are a triumph of world-building—not just for us, the viewers, but also for the characters, who solve the mystery as well.
One of the uses of speculative fiction—and fiction in general—is that it allows us to look at our world as outsiders might. In September 1961, as the Soviet Union prepared to test the largest nuclear bomb ever, CBS aired “The Shelter,” an episode of “The Twilight Zone” that begins at a doctor’s birthday party, in a pleasant New York suburb. . In a toast, one of his neighbors gently mocks him for the noise he made while building an underground dust shelter. A few minutes later, a radio broadcast announced a yellow alert: a radar system had detected a possible missile attack. The guests rush into the house in terror without another word.
The doctor retreats behind a metal door when a neighbor returns. The man begs for a place in the shelter, then demands it, but there is only room for the doctor and his family. “I kept telling you… ‘Get ready,’ he says. ‘To build a shelter is to acknowledge the kind of times we live in, and none of you have had the courage to face that!'” Other neighbors arrive and fight for a few minutes over who should be let in. Finally, they open the door with a heavy pipe. Then an update comes out over the radio. The radar footage was a false alarm.
“Shelter” did not depict dystopia, at least not in the way we typically use the term. But these days the line is much blurrier. after Wildfires broke out in Los Angeles Last week, many turned to Octavia E. Butler published in 1993, “Like the sower,” which is set in the 1920s and describes “entire blocks of boarded-up buildings burning in Los Angeles.” Butler owned a house in Altadena, and her story begins in a desolate version of the city she knew, torn apart by inequality and climate change. Now a big part of Altadena. Even the cemetery where Butler was buried is on fire. And yet her writings are not just as miserable as they suggest, so quietly, that a better world might be Possibly, her grave is marked with a footstone that quotes the book: “Everything you touch changes. Everything you change, changes you.” ♦
