Fallout: A Glimpse at Humanity through its Destruction

 

Creating a Universe

For this paper I’m going to focus mainly on the events, characters, and universe of Fallout’s 3 and 4, but because this universe is so complex and intricately connected, there are themes and events that relate to the entire fallout universe that I need to touch on in order to talk about some of the most interesting concepts of Fallout. For a video game, I find Fallout to be extremely fulfilling, but not because of its action and violence, but because of the uniquely immense and detailed stories that the series tells through the perspective of the main character, all built upon this giant universe that spans through several installments, not unlike Game of Thrones, Star Wars, or the Mad Max series. What I love most about this series is that you as the player are actually exploring two completely new worlds. One is the pre-apocalyptic United States, whose history has diverged from our own sometime around the time of World War II. This alone would be amazing to explore, because who doesn’t like a glimpse at a futuristic utopian United States with robots and laser weapons. Instead, we experience the world almost 200 after its destruction and we are left to discover what this world was like between our own timeline and the year 2077 through the debris and destruction of the apocalypse. Thus, Fallout is introducing the new ideas and norms of two worlds unknown to us and it can be equally exciting to discover what the world was like between 1950 and 2077 as it is to discover what world is like over 200 years later in the year 2277.

 

Society & Economy

The creators of Fallout thought of everything when it came to the persistence of humanity through the destruction of the apocalypse. Almost as soon as the first people exited their protective vaults, a currency system was created through the use of Nuka-Cola bottlecaps based on the hard value of purified water. Bottlecaps were chosen because while they could easily be found from the tops of these old sodas, there were no existing ways to produce anymore so there was no risk of counterfeits or mass inflation. The use of water as a basis in interesting because it’s reminiscent of the gold-standard the United States had until the 1970s and because purified water is arguably the most important resource in a post-apocalyptic setting it definitely makes sense that water is the new gold. Asides from bottle caps and water, critically important items such as guns, ammos, armor, medical supplies, and technological scrap have become valuable forms of currency in their own right, especially because bartering has become the primary form of economic exchange. With that in mind most people will work just for the promise of a meal and roof over their head.

Because bartering and trade is the primary way of exchange in this new world, the act of rummaging through ruins for valuable goods has become a prominent new profession. Because looting is considered a cynical term even after the bombs have fallen, these rummagers of old buildings are called prospectors at an attempt to diverge from labels such as thieves, looters, and grave robbers. These ‘prospectors’ make up the back-bone of post-apocalyptic society because without them there is no material that which the survivors of this desolate world can use to rebuild. When playing the games of the Fallout Universe you are spurred on by a story, whether it be following your missing father played by Liam Neeson or saving the vault you grew up in, but either way you inevitably find yourself in the role of a prospector exploring the grisly and interesting ruins that the year 2077 left you, selling your scrap for some needed caps, medicine, or water.

Racism

Another interesting aspect of the fallout universe is the elimination of racism as we know it in the modern sense. Racism between people of different skin colors and nationalities has been essentially erased because all the history of all these racial prejudices has all been erased since the bombs fell. Sadly, that does not mean bigotry or prejudice has been erased from the world, because just like the slogan “war never changes” people in this new world have still designated all too familiar concepts of in-groups and out-groups. Instead of human on human racism, we now see a more complex sort of bigotry involving two major out-groups, ghouls and synths.

Ghouls are human beings who have survived in the post-apocalyptic wasteland since the bombs fell due to insane amounts of radiation that did not ultimately kill them, but instead turned them into heavily irradiated and disfigured humans. Whereas once we saw segregation in the United States based on nationalities and skin color this has been adapted to fit the ghouls of the new world with a host of new slurs and resentment, and sadly we see ghouls being forced to live in the worst conditions. These ghouls are often called zombies and ferals simply because of their looks despite the very real humanity they have been able to hold onto for hundreds of years. It’s a disturbing yet realistic concept that humans feel this need to band together against a group of ‘others’ because when bands of humans have come together they have this strange need to establish this ‘other’ in order to justify the concept of ‘us’ as a group. It’s eerily similar to concepts like nationalism, where a group is able to grow closer and feel more connected to one another by defining these out-groups and i- groups with trivial concepts like appearance and language.

The other main example of prejudice in this world would be the concern around Fallout’s synthetic humans. These ‘synths’ have been replicated as machines to be almost human, even down to the blood, guts, and emotions, but because they are the other and because their creation reflects the actions of  ‘scientific boogiemen’ they become just as much of a target as minorities groups of our own world. In Fallout 4, there are even parallels to the United States Civil War and the fight against slavery, most notably because the main group fighting for the rights and freedom of these synthetic humans are known as the Railroad. It is a really interesting subplot because it explores new concepts of bigotry and prejudice that stems from the fear of the unknown and it is disturbingly interesting that after 200 years, prejudice has moved away from humans against humans and has been adapted into human against semi-human conflict and raises deep existential questions like what makes someone human.

 

Changing History

It’s not clear exactly when the historical timeline between our universe and Fallout’s universe split. The main differences are that after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII the United States invested in nuclear technology and robotics instead of computers and the culture of the 1950s has lasted for over a hundred years. However, to me, the most haunting similarities between our universe and the fallout universe are the Cold War similarities and the similarities centering around the resource wars. Instead of getting into a cold war situation with the Soviet Union, the United States primary communist enemy are the Chinese after the events of World War II and in this universe the Cold War never really ends. Because of this never ending Cold War, what really sparks the nuclear holocaust is the resource wars over depleting fossil fuels and resources like timber and the two superpowers quest for hegemony. This is eerily similar to the current state of our world where it’s inevitable that natural resources like oil will dwindle in the next fifty years and new conflicts over the availability of these resources is inevitable. When you realize how historical events such as the resource wars transpired in Fallout and you are able to make connections with how these events ultimately led to a nuclear holocaust, it can be extremely unnerving how similar our two worlds are before the bombs fell, because who is to say that our own resource wars in our own world won’t ultimately end in something catastrophic like the dropping of a nuclear warhead.

The Unique World of Fallout

Anthropology

One thing extremely unique to the gaming experience of Fallout is the arrangement of skeletons that the Wanderer encounters while exploring the post-apocalyptic remains of the United States. The game developers of Fallout have set up these skeletons in a way that really conveys the immediacy of the apocalypse because these people died in the middle of whatever action they were occupied with, having almost no time to react to the bombs. Because of this we get a glimpse as some of the interesting, tragic, and sometimes comical activities that pre-apocalypse Americans were doing at the time the bombs. Examples are countless and some require you to use some inner anthropologist instincts to interpret exactly what scene you’re walking in on, almost 200 years after the fact. Examples include a bank robbery, a drug deal, a detective hunting a serial murderer, suicide pacts, and my personal favorite, a wheel chaired couple propped together to watch the world end together, hand in hand, accepting their fate. Fallout really is a glimpse at humanity in its last throws of normalcy and through its skeletons we get to see exactly how the denizens of the pre-war Utopia spent their last moments.

Interpreted History

For me, one of the most distressful aspects of the Fallout universe is how the citizens of the current time are so misinformed about the actual history of the United States. They range from the funny to the depressing especially for me because as a lover of history, it is a personal hurt to see someone confidently spouting the fake history of the foundation of the United States with total certainty, 200 years after the bombs took away almost all records of American history. This type of thing is seen in several cases, and examples include a baseball enthusiast who understands the sport of baseball to be a gladiatorial like sport where the teams were thought to butcher each other with baseball bats while others include ignorant raiders thinking that Henry David Thoreau was famous because when he traveled to Walden Pond he was definitely prepared and thus inspired the term “being thorough”. As a lover of history these kind of moments make you cringe and because your character is just part of this ignorant world 200 years later, there’s no way for you to convince them otherwise. However, when these serious grievances to historical memory have been committed it really makes me think about our own world and what kind of crazy misinterpretations we have about our own human history. While the world of Fallout is a much more destroyed universe, it brings to mind parallels to feudal Europe and the dark ages where the intellectual centers of the world like Rome and Baghdad were destroyed as a result of mindless warfare.

 

The Raiders

The most barbaric and anarchic of the groups that frequent the fallout universe, the raiders, are ruthless bands of human beings who have devolved into madness, looking like they’ve popped out of George Miller’s Mad Max series. They are interesting because they embrace whole heartedly the brutality of the new world and live in a hierarchy where the most destructive and insane individuals command the most power. They add a senseless and brutal element to the fallout universe that counteract the attempts at order and progress in the new world. It is extremely interesting because one observes these grand conflicts between big technologically advanced players like the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel, but more likely than not you as a survivor in this world need to be more concerned about not taking the wrong turn on a derelict street and becoming a raider’s dinner. You are more likely to be destroyed by the anarchic mess that is the raiders than you are to be affected by the ‘games’ of big players like those in Fallout 3. That being said, how does one attempt to civilize a world where the majority of your enemies are hanging cut up bodies from ropes from ceilings and poles. It’s not as if one of the major players were to come into power, that they’d then be able to convert and adapt these raider types back into society. When people have devolved to such a level that they know nothing but violence and death there is no way to attempt diplomacy and the only way to handle that situation is through a show of force, not unlike the terrible conquerors and colonizers of European history. The level of brutality and mass bloody murder really speaks to the harshness of the Fallout universe, because it’s the world they live in that makes them this way, and at times you can sympathize because if somebody is starving, dying of thirst, or going crazy with radiation poisoning its sadly understandable why a human being could become so violent, hostile, and void of emotion and humanity.

 

 

 

The Secrets of the Old World

Creepy Cult

There’s a lot of eerie stuff in Fallout, no question. With raiders, mutated animals, and giant super mutants, there is an enormous amount of fear factor embedded into this apocalyptic world. However, some of the scariest stuff in the fallout universe comes from information you gain about the secrets of the world before the war, the kind of secrets that would shock the world today if they were to come out now, especially because we only realize these dark truths because there was nobody left to guard these secrets. For example, there’s a satanic cult based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft whose remnants we barely get a glimpse of in the game, but what we see paints a horrific scene of the worship of some dark power, which very possibly may have real influence on the world. Because you only seen the faintest glimpses of this dark cult, one can only speculate on how widespread and entrenched into society it is, but it does highlight the idea that there’s a ton of dark stuff that already exists in our world without adding war and nuclear holocaust into the midst. These types of terrible things are the types of material that make up of conspiracy theories and I find it thought-provoking that these dark American secrets are so well kept that they are only found out after the world as we know it has been destroyed

Super Mutants

Super Mutants are the result of one of the United States dark secrets that we ultimately uncover through our playing and exploration of Fallout. Super Mutants came into being because they were once human beings whom the American government experimented on using a weaponized virus known as FEV or the Forced Evolutionary Virus. FEV made people rapidly grow stronger with extreme consequences. Instead of making the test subjects stronger and better soldiers, the disease instead leads to rapid mutation and sterility which results in some of the most disturbing creatures of the apocalyptic wasteland. Like many of the horrific secrets of the wasteland, the FEV was created by the United States in order to gain a competitive edge over the Chinese and the primary goal was to make super soldiers, not unlike the program that Captain America was part of. However, when the United States and China have reached this level of warfare, it is very apparent that military leaders on both sides are getting nervous and using more reckless decisions and while ultimately this program gets destroyed along with everything else after the bombs fall, one can easily discern the levels of paranoia that are spreading around the globe if both sides are willing to develop crazy, harmful weaponized virus and later use the atomic bombs. After the bombs fell, however, and this terrible secret was uncovered it led to the mass creation of the giant Hulk-like super mutants in support of the “master” we see in the game. The story is that a former human discovered the facility where these tests were going down and he used this terrible technology to make an army of mutants and threatened all the existing remnants of humanity that had made it through the bombs. The Master is ultimately destroyed by the main character from the original Fallout pc game, but the damage is done and super mutants now wander the ruins of the U.S. and in the rest of the Fallout stories, all of the super mutants we see are simply the mutated monster remnants of the master’s army. However, an interesting tidbit is that not all mutants controlled by the master continued being awful after the Master was defeated. Instead there are numerous cases of ‘reformed’ super mutants regaining their mental capabilities and conforming with post-apocalyptic society, even going so far as becoming community leaders and faithful protectors of humans and ghouls alike.

 

 

Vault Tec

Apart from military secrets and hidden, yet widespread sadistic cults, the creepiest thing fallout reveals about pre-apocalyptic America is Vault Tec and their disturbing experiments on unsuspecting occupants of pre-war vaults where inhabitants were promised a life after the bombs fell. Occupants were enlisted based on different qualifications and all the staff members knew from the get go that most of the inhabitants would be manipulated and experimented on. In Fallout 3, the vault that you as the main character leave is actually one of the few control tests or at least non-awful tests that seemed only to allow for the regeneration of multiple genetic lines free from sadistic experiments. In Fallout 4, you and your family are tricked into entering cryogenic chambers just after the bombs have fallen and your family has entered into the vault. This one to me is also a bit of an acceptation, because while most of the other occupants do not make it, you survived a horrific death by nuclear bombing, so despite their evil experiments you kind of owe Vault Tec if you can call it that. Apart from these two however, the rest of Vault Tec is basically evil scientist porn.

The experiments of Vault Tec are many and awful. One involves grouping together some of the most brilliant musical minds of the United States and then testing various levels of white noise until they were driven insane and murdered one another and the Vault Tec staff. Another experiment involved filling a vault full of various types of recovering addicts, helping them with 5 years of treatment, community outreach, and programs, and then opening a secret compartment filled with a life time supply of drugs and alcohol. Everyone in the entire vault ended up overdosing or killing one another despite years of treatment and help. Yet another vault experiment involved gathering up a bunch of kids in one area, taking their parents aside and murdering them, and then they basically attempt to breed generations of super pure genetic specimens out of the original kids in order to create the most healthy and superior human beings possible. Kids that are too smart get scientist jobs and kids who perform well are forced to procreate and then killed off. The happy ending of this story however is that the children rebel and all the Vault Tec staff are killed, leaving the unknown possibility that the kids escaped. Actually it turns out that most Vault Tec situations end up with the Vault Tec staff getting murdered for some reason or another because of the horrible experiments they commit, and it is hard to say they didn’t deserve it. It’s an insane idea that such experiments could ever be devised and applied to fellow human beings, but Fallout makes us shudder and squirm when we explore and realize exactly how cruel Vault Tec was and how they used innocent and vulnerable subjects to perform some of the most sadistic experiments in the human imagination.

Cultural Influences

One of the concepts most unique to the fallout universe is the permeation of the culture of the 1950’s as well as some of the obvious influence from film and literature that one can observe in the game. When playing one can see that the styles of music, cars, art, houses, and technology all look distinctively like the styles of the 1950’s. Even the technological advances unknown to our real universe look like they have come out of concept designs of what advanced technology would look like from the perspective of the people living in the 1950s, similar to what you’d find in a world’s science fair. It’s incredibly interesting to explore the remains of the United States because it explores the idea that a culture relevant to a certain time period could persist for over a hundred years while advances in technology, energy, medicine, and civil rights are still ongoing. It makes me think of places such as Cuba or North Korea which are stereotyped as being frozen in time because while many things have changed, there are still obvious throwbacks to earlier times that is apparent through cultural aspects such as music, clothing, and artistic style.

Some real life cultural influences that have inspired the world of Fallout include works such as the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the Mad Max franchise, and the book/film that inspired the lovable companion, Dogmeat, A Boy and His Dog. The fallout creators had a lot of material concerning dystopian post-apocalyptic settings and I think they took a lot of the concepts of desolate survival from these works, but I think they went above and beyond from their predecessors by having their reality split from ours as early as the 1950’s so that not only could they explore the ramifications of an alternative history, but because they used this alternative history to create a completely new future resulting from the unique changes in history they adapted to their own universe in combination with the dangerous realities of what our own future might entail.

Common Themes

War Never Changes

One of the biggest themes in the Fallout Universe is the idea that “war never changes” as spouted by Ron Pearlman before every Fallout game. Until I wrote this paper, I never really thought deeply about that message, because war in the traditional sense is not how I would categorize the conflicts of the post-apocalyptic United States, but after more thoughtful consideration it makes a lot of sense. In Fallout 3, the idea that war never changes is represented in the conflict between the supposed remnants of the United States government, the Enclave, and the neo-knight organization known as the Brotherhood of Steel. Instead of banding together as humans against common problems like the need for purified water sources or eliminating hostile mutants, the fight is about control over the new world. While we ultimately view the Brotherhood as protagonists, their goals are not all that dissimilar with those of the Enclave, especially when you consider that the branch of the Brotherhood based in Washington D.C. is not respected by the organization as a whole because they strive too hard to help human beings instead of focusing on the acquisition of technology and the exploration for ways to advance humanity on a large scale. The conflict between the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel definitely embodies the idea that war never changes because just like the nuclear holocaust shows, mankind is its own worst enemy. This theme is seen in other renditions of Fallout as well. In Fallout New Vegas set in post war Nevada, the story shows us a conflict between the democratic society of the New California Republic against an encroaching force of neo Romans led by a man who deems himself Caesar. In Fallout 4 we see the same thing, just on a grander scale with more factions vying for control over the new world with a focus on domination rather than collaboration. In all of these games there is conflict at a grand scale with each group vying for dominance based on rationality they deem to be correct. The leaders of all these groups feel that they are in the right and that they have a realistic and credible authority to create war and fight for their cause. Because of this and what we know about where war got the world when the bombs fell in the first place, the basics of war do not change and humans continue to fight and die over ideals that are not all that different in the midst of a post-apocalyptic world where just like in the real world we live in, too much effort is put into destruction and conquering rather than diplomacy and creation.

Conclusion

The Fallout Universe is enormous. There are probably a thousand concepts and plot lines I haven’t touched on, but my main purpose is to express how complex, immense, and hauntingly realistic Fallout is. The creators of Fallout have created an entirely new world to be explored and have filled it with new struggles that explore the deepest corners of our humanity. Fallout as a universe is fantastic because it is impossible to explore everything and to know every story and so much information we get is based on intuition and subtle hints. Fallout really allows us to explore two completely different worlds from our own, the one from the 1950’s to 2077 and the apocalyptic wasteland after 2277. By allowing us this view of a unique historical divergence from the frame of a world destroyed, Fallout is deep, complex, and disturbingly realistic answer to several what if questions about our own mysterious future.

Life After Life

My favorite part about Life After Life so far is the language used by Sylvie and Ursula, especially when we get a glimpse at their thought processes for two main reason. One because their thoughts trains are realistically constructed and drift in ways so that I could see myself coming to the same conclusions that these two come to when faced with similar situations, and two, because both Sylvie and Ursula often have complex understandings of certain situations, but often do not convey they’re full thoughts on the matter, whether it’s because of the gendered restraints put on these women because of the historical time period or because Ursula isn’t fully conveying the mysterious de ja vu experiences to her family.

Because of the language Atkinson uses, I have conflicting feelings on Sylvie’s character. I think she’s complex and deeply intelligent despite the fact that she hasn’t had any formal education, and she has one of my favorite scenes in the book where she first refers to her friends gawking at the newborn Urusla as cooing doves and then she thinks about it and clarifies by saying something along the lines of “or more like the lesser species, the pigeon.” And while that line was a bit hostile and negative, it made me laugh out loud and sympathize with the monotony of her life when dealing with boring formalities and proper standards of behavior. The way that we understand her through her motherly actions and through her critical yet intelligent thoughts makes her seem like an Old Soul to me, especially because she had Maurice so young. However, I can no longer bring myself to like her as a character after her handling of the whole Howie incident. It just made me extremely frustrated to think that I understood her as a character through Ursula’s childhood to only be immensely saddened by how she treated Ursula when she came to understand what happened to her daughter. I’m loving this book so far, but my main criticism is how sympathetic and understanding we come to be about Sylvie’s complex life for her then to turn into a bit of an antagonist because of her mistreatment of Ursula, a character we’ve come to love.

The dystopian setting of the Leftovers was a lot less extreme compared to most of the other dystopian settings we’ve read about so far, maybe excluding the subtleness of Never Let Me Go. The fact that things are still going on mostly as usual is somewhat unsettling given the fact that 140 million people have gone missing. In the other dystopian settings we’ve read about it’s at least been much more evident that things are pretty bad on the outside of where the characters usually are. For example in Handmaid’s Tale, V for Vendetta, or even Black Hole it’s aware almost immediately that things are pretty rough whether it’s because of post-apocalypse like conditions or diseases running rampant among teens. But in the Leftovers, other than the initial scene where it shows us the instance where people are actually disappearing it’s not very obvious that anything is all that wrong with the world. Maybe it’s because when I think dystopian, I envision very obvious signs of degradation and destruction, either through the environment or because of the general welfare of the people and characters we encounter. In the Leftovers however, though I’m only going on an eventful first episode, it pulled us in with this crazy mysterious event that left the world completely changed from where it was moments earlier. Then for the rest of the episode it starts us back at a normal setting, where we get to see how civic life is ongoing because of ‘heroes day’ and schools are going on as usual, and we then slowly see how messed up life actually is after the ‘event’. I think as a pilot The Leftovers does a great job of hooking us in with a crazy dystopian event, returns us back to a state of normalcy, and then slowly reveals how interesting and terrible life is after the three years we don’t see.

While I really enjoyed both of our graphic novels, I would say I found Black Hole much more relatable and I think the problem for me with V for Vendetta was that I had already seen the movie and knew the story, so I was able to enjoy the story and chain of events of Black Hole that much more. While I can say I had a pretty decent, hazing and disease free high school experience I know myself and other people have felt some of the exact emotions that were expressed by Chris, Rob, Keith, and Eliza in this book dealing with the frustration of trying to be included and accepted and while simultaneously figuring out who you are.

When I first started Black Hole I didn’t put myself back into the mindset of being in high school and I felt somewhat superior and too adult for the character’s problems. I found myself struggling to connect to the characters because I found their personal concerns to be childish and overly dramatic. Then I kind of shifted my thinking to remember what it was like when I was in the high school world and then I actually started remembering that these things that Chris and Keith are actually miserable about were the exact B.S. I was worried about before I came to college. I feel like the ending of Black Hole was very good because when Chris, Keith, and Eliza are able to escape the town and the disease it reminded me just as many kids leave the hell of high school and get to go to college, life seems a lot simpler, or at the very least there’s so many new and cooler people to get to know separate from where you grew up.

Out of all the books we’ve read so far I found Children of Men to be the most depressing by a long shot. Specifically, I found the idea of sterility not only of men, but of different aspects of society to be utterly disheartening. I would have hoped or expected that if mankind were faced with some sort of imminent mass extinction crisis, then every single human being would be actively be working to find a solution. Instead we get crazy arrogant Omegas, baby crazy people who parade dolls around in strollers, and the lonely and miserable Theodore, a history professor who openly admits that his profession is near futile in the current age.

Also I found it very strange that even though the U.K. is now under the totalitarian leadership of Xan, there isn’t any use of this authoritarian power to try and save mankind. Rather, things such as the mass suicides of the elderly are encouraged by Xan’s government, when you would at least think that a dictator faced with the extinction of mankind would at least use his crazy authoritarian people to force people to work to find a solution, even if it was futile, because I figured that’s how a dictator should/would operate it such a situation. Overall, the way P.D. James portrays a society as slowly embracing its walk to extinction was not at all how I expected. I would have expected either the world’s governments to forcibly ensure that every person would be working towards preserving and saving humanity or I would have expected most people to voluntarily work at finding a cure, even if it meant filling menial roles that supported the efforts of scientists and researchers.

First off, I find the ideas and themes explored by Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale much scarier than most science fiction I’ve read minus Michael Crichton. Speculative fiction explores ideas and possibilities that are actually possible in the day and age that the book has been written. The dangerous or intensely scary situations put in place by our other books The Left Hand of Darkness and Kindred while realistic and definitely scary for the characters experiencing them, we at least know that these situations would never play out in our own lives. But at the time of the writing of the Handmaid’s Tale, there is a bunch of controversy over issues extremely relevant to the situations in the book such as women’s rights, including rights concerning abortion with Wade vs. Roe, and issues concerning the rise of the religious right, and the increasing awareness of environmental problems.

I can understand why Margaret Atwood was somewhat unhappy with her work being categorized as science fiction literature mainly because that was not her goal or her meaning when she wrote the book. To Atwood, not only was Science Fiction overly represented as a man’s game, but she also wanted her book to be a reflection of what realistically could happen if some extreme historical events were to take place. The power and intrigue of her book is not the alien United Nations or the concept of time travel we’ve seen in our other two books, but rather it’s the fact that all the events and circumstance of a Handmaid’s Tale are eerily conceivable in the eyes of the reader. We know as we are reading her work that had a few organized and insanely minded people could change the entire system of the United States.  I think that it is also somewhat humorous that these crazy situations described in the Handmaid’s Tale are not all that different than what everyone is saying about all the hell that will break loose if Donald Trump were to be elected as president.

I found it really interesting that there were so many concepts, themes, characters, or even words that we were able to connect with other science fiction type works even if this literary work wasn’t necessarily used for inspiration. For example we talked about how King Agraven is characterized as the “Mad King” which is mirrored in one of my favorite sub-plots of any literary work ever, that is found in George R.R. Martin’s  Game of Thrones. Because of the time the Left Hand of Darkness was written in, it very well could have been hidden inspiration for a generation of science fiction writers and movie creators.

Other similarities could include the theory of space travel and the Ekumen and even the word ‘sith’ that all bear similarities to George Lucas’ Star Wars while the concept of aging more slowly or quickly based on space travel reminds me a great deal of interstellar. These kind of similarities is to me what makes science fiction so grand because although many details of utopian or dystopian created words bear similarities, but science fiction writers are in no short supply of topics to discuss or worlds to create, and to me it seems like science fiction can only get better as writers and creators are able to build on ideas, worlds, and possibilities that those of the previous generation have laid out.

I just really enjoyed the fact that we were able to bring up different books and movies that we’ve all known and enjoyed and point out that there are many similarities between works that we love and the older works like Left Hand of Darkness that most of us haven’t read before.