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There is nothing like a dream to create the future. I don't remember where I saw this—whether I read it or heard it from someone—but it's an idea that has stuck with me ever since. Not in the sense of dreaming while we sleep, but rather in the sense of imagining.
I've liked science fiction since I was a kid, even when the future it showed wasn't exactly bright, like in post-apocalyptic worlds and cyberpunk settings. But the fiction genre suffers from a certain prejudice because it's seen as having less value than non-fiction, dismissed as something "made up"—just make-believe.
My view is the complete opposite: fiction, whether scientific or not, is a way of addressing human issues. The issues may be dressed up, but they remain human at their core.
Stretching the logic of reality
Creating a fictional world, even if it's entirely different from the reality we live in, is an exercise in stretching existing logic and, from there, leading the reader or viewer to a different yet recognizable reality. Because it's impossible to fully escape the human logic we know.
Fiction is, then, an exercise in creating human problems, their consequences, and sometimes their solutions. It doesn't need to become real to be worthwhile, the setting may be impossible, but the problem behind it is not.
The movie District 9 is an interesting example. It basically shows the same prejudice we know from South Africa's apartheid past. It's apartheid, just with aliens. Dressed up that way, the film reaches people who might otherwise have no interest in social themes, and it can approach the subject more freely, in a rawer, more unguarded way.
Okja is another example, which shows animal suffering but with a mutant pig. I normally wouldn't watch a film with that theme, but there I was with teary eyes over a mutant pig.
You could make this kind of analysis with pretty much any work of fiction.
And what happens when reality gets too close to fiction?
Today it's impossible not to see uncomfortable parallels with some works of fiction. Specifically, I want to talk about the cyberpunk genre, the central theme of this blog.
Hyper-surveillance, whether in apps, social media, or with security cameras scattered everywhere, has taken a massive leap in scale with artificial intelligence. Not because it got better, but because the algorithms behind it got far more detailed. And as it grows, errors multiply too. And the response is always just some version of "we're sorry, it was a machine error, and we're working on ways to be more effective."
What's most frightening is that governments keep handing this surveillance over to private companies. How it is carried out, and what gets monitored, is decided based on private interests.
What does this mean? It means we're at the mercy of government laws and corporate, market-driven rules. You can't even pretend it's "for the good of the population."
Maybe that's the answer to the question in the title. Fiction is how we dream the future before it arrives, giving us the chance to recognize it when it shows up. The problem was never that we dreamed these dystopian futures. It's that we didn't listen to the warning in time.