Opinion Today: We’re feeling stuck

And our sci-fi dystopias reflect that.

View in browser|nytimes.com July 9, 2024 By Adam Sternbergh Culture Editor, Opinion Every generation gets the dystopian visions it deserves, or at least the ones that best express its most persistent anxieties. At the turn of the millennium we saw fictional fantasies of civilizational chaos, from Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" to the resurgence of zombie apocalypse movies. These dark visions were dramatically different from, say, a dystopia like George Orwell's "1984," which hailed from a different era and invoked brutal totalitarianism, not social collapse. A new theme has arisen in popular science fiction musings: what Hillary Kelly, in a guest essay published last weekend, calls "the stucktopia." She noticed a curious trend in science-fiction TV shows: characters trapped inside a labyrinthine world, sheltering from some outside threat they are too cowed to face. They are, in short, stuck — with no obvious way out. Why this particular nightmare right now? When you look around, it seems obvious: "Stuck" is the perfect term to describe so much of how life feels right now. Never mind a fearful pandemic that left people stranded indoors. Even since the loosening of pandemic restrictions, life has taken on an ominous sense of déjà vu. Look no further than a presidential campaign that features the first rematch since 1956 and an electorate that's expressed a widespread desire for new options. Stucktopia is less a new kind of dystopia than perhaps a preamble to the dystopia to come: the sense that we're all spinning our wheels in anticipation of the ominous fate that awaits. But don't give up hope. We survived Big Brother and fast zombies. As Kelly explains in the essay, these dystopian visions of life as an endless hamster wheel also offer some hopeful clues on how we might dismount it. 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