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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  3137 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, and Why It Matters

I'm a novice's novice when it comes to scifi, but when I think of scifi (or scifi-ish) movies and books that I've really liked (e.g., brave new world, man in the high castle, matrix, cloud atlas, gattaca) they are pretty much all about race and class based oppression. There's a reason for that. It's because scifi stories are all essentially thought experiments, experiments in which the writer tries to envision a world where some new technology exists that radically changed the world. Then (s)he attempts to figure out how characters might behave in that world in a way that is consistent with human nature. Since human nature is to oppress, that's what the characters with power do. However, the trick is that it's easier for us, the readers, to spot the problems in the imaginary world, because the tools of oppression are decoupled from our day to day social order. I think. That is, it's easier to look at handsome, white Ethan Hawke and feel bad for him, because his genes are suboptimal, than it is to look at your local inner city and not blame the victim.