Today, we use a recent Trek event to reflect on the pain of near-future storytelling that imagines worlds as ugly as our own and also somehow more optimistic.
There are plenty of real-world touchstones for the Bell Riots of DS9, which we just marked this past week. But are there real-world touchstones for the *change* that DS9 imagines will come after one bout of violence goes too far?
#StarTrek #SFF #Humanism #Economics #Housing #BellRiots #Politics
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/the-bell-riots-and-us
@MLClark This was a good article about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine predicting “Income inequality, homelessness, and other social ills of the 2020s … in 1995.” (posted Feb 2021).
https://www.vox.com/culture/22273263/star-trek-deep-space-nine-past-tense-prediction-2024
Some depictions of the future are more prescient than others, eh? And the best seem to be the ones that extend contemporary crises into future generations, knowing full well how little humanity ever changes at its core. Thanks for sharing!