Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Geek Time. 欢迎回来【 Geek时间】. Hi, Brad.

Hey, Lulu.

Brad, I can I propose a topic today?

Sure.

So when I watch Sci-Fi films and TV series or Sci-Fi related books, it's quite often that you see these books or works, they're trying to portray a world that is almost like heaven on earth. Everything's perfect, everything is regulated, everything runs smoothly, nothing ever goes wrong.

Yeah. So that's like the idea of utopia.

Utopia. Let's talk about that, shall we?

OK. I guess we can kind of start with what exactly is utopia, just like you mentioned, right? It's a perfect society. But when you look at Sci-Fi, there's few different ideas behind it. There's like ecological utopia is where everyone kind of lives in a perfect balance with nature. There's more economic utopias where the economy is running without any… it's running self-sustainably.

But when you look at the word, utopia, it's kind of an interesting thing. In Greek, it means no place. So it kind of like there is this idea that it's perfect, but it can never exist.

First of all, let's slow down a little bit here.

OK.

So utopia, in Chinese we translated usually into 乌托邦. 很有意思, 就是中文里面乌托邦, 前面的乌是子虚乌有的乌, so it's like Brad said no place, but it's actually a play on word because it can actually also mean good place?

Yeah.

And then originally, ages and ages ago, there was a book called Utopia, so that sort of started that idea of this perfect world. And like Brad was saying, 乌托邦有很多种, 比如说 ecological eutopia, 主要是跟生态系统的整个的非常的和谐的一个状态, 或者是economic utopia where economy is self-sustainable.

A few years back, you remember there was a quite popular animated film called Zootopia.

OK. Yeah. I've watched most of it. I haven't seen the ending though.

Yeah, but the idea was also that all these animals no matter if they’re meat eaters or plant eaters, they live…they're supposedly living in harmony. It's like animal heaven on earth animal version.

Yeah.

But what about the scientific or technological utopias in Sci-Fi films?

Okay. Yeah, like when we look at Sci-Fi utopias, usually something to do with science and medicine or technology that helps bring about this utopian place.

So you mean, like science and technology are super advanced, and people like never get old, never get sick and never die that's sort of thing.

Yeah, it could be that technology has become super advanced and we don't have to worry about things. Occasionally, it might just be less advanced but that we've learned to use that technology to kind of sustain life in a sustainable way.

Like a… you can look at Star Trek, Star Treks Federation is kind of based on this utopian society where we no longer use money. We can create everything that we need and people that want to can devote their life to the exploration of space. We go out and try to create this federation with all the other planets out there.

Yeah. But having said that, having talked about the idea of utopia which is having on earth perfect world, I've also noticed that in these works, almost all of them, they're not like comedies, they're not like stories about these perfect world, it's almost, always about these supposed utopias turned into hell on earth. It's turning into a dystopia.

这个在中文里叫反乌托邦或者叫敌托邦, dystopia. So what is the idea of a dystopia?

Basically, when you look at Sci-Fi, every utopia is a dystopia.

Because when you're getting into this idea that there is a utopia, you watch how it slowly devolves over the course of the film, either by the means of the technology or by the means of someone else who is subverting the technology to do terrible things.

When we look at it and a classic version of a dystopian society, there is a good example which is Logan's Run, one of the first science fiction movies I watched as a kid.

The whole society is built as this utopian society. The movie itself is set after the world that's been fairly destroyed by a nuclear war. Everyone lives in this underground dome.

You said this is supposed to be utopia, that doesn't sound like utopia.

Everyone who lives in the society, they don't really know that the whole world outside has been destroyed. They live in this happy underground area. They have everything they want, they have all the food they could ever eat. It's rather hedonistic. They don't have like a particular domestic partner. They can meet up with whoever they want.

It's just having fun every day, basically.

Pretty much. Now, what makes it a dystopia is that everyone, as they grow older from their childhood into their adulthood, they have these little gems on their hand, and the color starts coming out.

But you once turn 30, the gem becomes red. And on their 30th birthday, they're supposed to go into this thing called carousel. It's kind of like a carousel where the horses go up and down. But instead, it's the people that are like going up and down around in the circle. And they're going to their death, essentially. They don't know that, they think they're ascending to another world.

But some people know the truth. And so when they turn 30, they try to run. That's why it's called Logan's Run

Talk about the midlife or early midlife crisis. That sounds horrible. So that is a seemingly perfect utopia, but it's actually a dystopia.

Right.

Actually, it reminds me of a very famous book also be made into films multiple times. It's called Brave New World, 《美丽新世界》. That is also a typical dystopian tale, isn't it?

People are manufactured and not only are they manufactured, but their happiness is manufactured through the use of a drug. Everyone, they go and they take their medicine daily and that medicine makes them happy.

Now the interesting thing about that is when people are born, they're basically tested and put into a case based on their ability, whether it's their physical ability or their mental ability. And people are kept happy and within their case by the drug that they take. So it's kind of interesting. The whole idea is based off of like Henry Ford's assembly line, just put into people's life.

Ah, I mean, it really sounds like a lot of these utopia turned dystopia. They are about stripping people off their humanity and almost turning them into objects or machines, that sort of idea.

Yeah. You can said… and a lot of them, you are turning people into it basically biomechanical organisms.

And especially with Sci-Fi, with all these technological advances, it just sounds even more… I don't know, it just sounds more cold blooded, because it feels like… it makes people like me who's not very scientific, it makes me really fear the advances of science and technology that… to what extent will we lose our humanity. I guess that's the big question.

Yeah. I mean, we use technology and we just have to be careful with how much we let it run our lives. We have to just make sure that we understand the technology we use that way. We're in control of it rather than it being in control of us.

I think we can obviously delve much deeper into the topic in our advanced episode about utopia and dystopia and some new words related to these ideas.

Definitely.

All right. On that note, we're going to wrap up here. Leave as a comment in the comment section, share with us some of the utopian or dystopian novels you've read or movies or TV shows you've watched. Thank you, Brad for coming to the show.

No problem. See you in the next episode.

See you.

Goodbye, everyone.