Lyman Tower Sargent and Pat Cadigan

Lyman Tower Sargent has a great opinion on what dystopia means to him. "non-existent society described In considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than society in which that reader lived" (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 69). What the quote is basically saying is that the point of most science fiction movies and literature is to portray how much worse the future could become than what we already make it out to be. I have seen many different movies that fit in to this statement. For example, The Terminator (1984) displays one of the worst possibilities of our future and what it holds for the human race. The main idea of the film is how we rely so much on machines, which in today’s world is very true, and the technology gets so out of hand that it eventually becomes more intelligent than the human race.  Intelligence leads to power which then brings domination over humans and planet earth. The beginning of the extinction of the human race is called “Judgment Day”. The theory of humans being overrun by machines is a very valid theory just because of how advanced the technology already is to this day and how fast the advancements keep coming. Every year that passes by, the speed of advancement is increasing, doubling, tripling, quadrupling, etc. At the rate it is happening, I do not see any reason why we could not take the film seriously. Improving our electronics has many different advantages to it, but there are two sides to everything.

            People have different opinions for almost everything and Pat Cadigan has something very interesting that she states. "Human beings are neither utopian nor dystopian so that’s what I choose to reflect in my books" (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 70). She backs her statement up by then saying "I don’t think I’m dystopian at all. No more than I’m utopian" (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 70). To me what Cadigan is trying to say is that even though we are creating new technology in order to create a utopia, the crime rates are still the same or going up. In other words there is no dystopia or utopia because humans are stuck in the middle. If by some chance it is not what she is getting at then it is what I believe. There is no way out because the world’s population is just too large in order to get everyone to cooperate. If by some miracle people could work things out and get all of the evil-doers to stop and work together to be productive then maybe we could create a utopia where everything is perfect or at least closer to being perfect. The prisons would not be over crowded which would lead to a much better economy. Prisons are one of the main reasons the U.S. is in debt because all of the tax payer’s money is going to feeding and housing the prisoners. If war did not play a factor in today’s world then humans could focus on more important things like creating less pollution and spreading the wealth among everyone. Instead there is poverty all around our planet and the environment is getting worse and worse. At the rate we are going in current day, nothing will be able to turn around and start going in the positive direction.