The first was an explicit critique of where we were headed with unchecked corporate control.

The second was, essentially, an apolitical futuristic sports movie.

From social critique to bread and circus...

Stephen King wrote a really good one as Richard Bachman called "The Long Walk."

Not the anti-nuke commentary of the first one, but instead, they opted for escaped genetic experiments upending the biosphere...

And yeah, Soylent Green. Wonder if they'd ever remake that with its essential message intact?

Picard tries and tries to explain to the now ex-billionaire that money is no longer a resource people clamor toward. The ex-billionaire huffs and says there is always 'someone or something to buy and sale'. Picard gives up in frustration.

He even nearly gets them all killed by mouthing off on the bridge. We will never learn anything from greed and destruction. Ever.

But a part of that future was the reconstruction of human society along democratic socialist lines after a planet-wide catastrophe and the die-off of a large part of humanity. Mankind is currently playing Russian Roulette with a gun in which there are five bullets in the six chambers. The odds are easy to calculate and they ain't good.

and his critique of the future is NOT what they want to hear!

He says the future sadly is still hopelessly run by the military powers that be. Even in future world, we cannot exist without war and strife. I like that the creators could add that into the story line - even with advances in the future (tech and society), humans were at war with someone and always will be. As depressing as that is.

And the warfare is generally confined to fringe, sparsely settled parts of the quadrant. Federation home worlds like Earth and Vulcan seem very peaceful.

Seriously think about that for a minute. Earth gets invaded by aliens a lot in the series and eventually Vulcan is destroyed by a Romulan military leader!

I think it must be hard to show a more progressive future, when your audience still craves violence and big space battles.

Who needs shiny new bridges or a state of the art transportation system when we can have lots of spiffy high tech military stuff and multiple choices for designer wars, a massive prison system, the unstoppable global surveillance system, or an armor-plated police force to die for... literally.

You started me thinking about these long-term trends.

One difference between the 50's & 60's dystopic SF (John Brunner, Cyril Kornbluth for example) is that back then, it came with a sort of "If these trends continue…" flavor. They could be read as a warning, like Morley & his chains.

I haven't seen or read the Hunger Games stuff, but I gather that the kids seeing it aren't having much trouble making the connection to the current world state of affairs. For them it's a metaphor about the way things are rather than a prediction or warning.

eom

Amen.

When I was young in the 60s, I fully expected to live in a 21st Century Utopia--something like Heinlein's *Beyond This Horizon*, with its strange, but compelling, combination of capitalism and socialism. That's the greatest Utopian novel ever written, and the only Utopia I'd actually want to live in. Instead, we have a combination of Philip K Dickian breakdown, with a streak of Harlan Ellisonian violence and madness. I never wanted to live in Interesting Times...

People want to explore bleaker realities than their own, perhaps.

BAND!!

But I'd call LTE progressive metal rather than death metal. /nitpick

Thanks for posting!

Now that is great music. Very talented musicians.

are greenlighted at certain times to lead people to think in certain ways?

Not at all that different than programming a really smart computer.

Sometimes, TV programs are just TV programs.

Guess you missed DS9?

Star Trek and Star wars...at first it was about the wonder of discovery then it became about War on a galactic scale.
Now most Sci Fi is about war and violence and that is what we have become as a culture.

And scarily there was a TV show from Name of the Game 1968 - 71 There is an episode LA 2017. The character Glenn Howard gets in a car crash after attending a meeting of key scientists and industrialistswhere it is disclosed that the earth's atmosphere is poisoned and billions are going to die. The industrialists overthrow the government, kill the scientists and go underground creating a strange underground world, ruled by a cold blooded dictatorship with a bizarre social and sexual code. You can watch part of it on You tube and Steven Spielberg directed the episode. The parallels to today are chilling. It's like a Koch Bros story written in 1971.

LA 2017 is season 3 episode 16 in the Name of the game series.

This needs to be in GT on the front page.