Weird Scenes Week 83: SF with a message - the dystopic visions of the counterculture era

It's hard to believe in the modern age of sheer bombast and explosion filled CG lightshows for their own sake, but not that long ago, the world of science fiction, yes, even that of the American cinema, tended to be devoted to a very different purpose and aesthetic.

Like their low paid visionary scribes from the likes of Welles and Verne in the 1800s to the pulps of the 20's and 30's and the edge of current science devotees and aspirationists of the 1950s, the science fiction authors of the 1960s and early 70's had far more in mind than a cheap hour or two of mindless escapism from an increasingly dreary corporatocratic nightmare world we've all come to accept as if it were predestined master rather than an out of control dog to be brought to heel.

For a few decades in particular, a hard SF mix of utopian aspiration and dystopian commentary and warning about then-new trends arising in contemporary society informed nearly every instance of same, from the lowest of budget to the highest of the highbrow, from the critically feted to the mocked and hated.  

Many of these names have gone on into legend: Orwell, Bradbury, Ellison, Ballard, Dick, Zelazny.  And many films built off or inspired by such literary works have held their place in pop culture circles: The Planet of the Apes films, 2001: A Space Odyssey...and many of the otherwise unrelated films we'll be discussing this evening, like Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Silent Running, A Boy and His Dog and Damnation Alley.

So join us tonight as we speak of those hoary days before Spielberg and Lucas turned cinema into a wasteland of brainless popcorn fare, and realize just how many of the horrors warned against may already have come into being in our day and age, begging the question: why didn't we listen?  Come and see what answers await, as we talk the thought provoking dystopias of the counterculture era, right here on Weird Scenes!

Week 83: SF with a message - the dystopic visions of the counterculture era 

 

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