ShmoopTube

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Just like you

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The Giver The Defenders and Blade Runner a la Shmoop.

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After zooming through time with the Time Machine...

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Barely living through Nineteen Eighty-Four...

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Surviving a Brave New World...

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And having your DNA tinkered with in Gattaca...

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You probably have tons of dystopian tropes floating around your brain.

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Its okay if you cant remember them all as long as you remember that theyre

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in there somewhere.

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Its not like anyone is erasing your memory.

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Not that youd remember if they had.

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In The Giver we see a world where selective memory runs rampantand its not the

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people selecting their own memories either.

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The Elders control everything in this world from the events people remember...

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To the colors they see.

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When our hero Jonas is selected by the Elders to receive all the memories of

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his community which have been suppressed the kid figures out that his black and white

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world could be a whole lot more...colorful.

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Of course as many dystopian heroes before Jonas have learned the knowledge that your seemingly

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perfect society is seriously flawed isnt necessarily a recipe for instant happiness.

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Having no memories most people in The Giver are perfectly fine with their situation.

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They have jobs.

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They have families.

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Sure these things have been assigned to them but at least they have them.

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And at least they have clean air to breathe.

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Thats more than we can say for humanity in Philip K.

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Dicks short story The Defenders.

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In this tale humanity has been driven underground after a nuclear holocaust and the

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war above is waged remotely by robots.

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Because you know being driven underground wasnt proof enough that nuclear holocausts are a bad idea.

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As is usual with anything by Philip K.

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Dick however nothing is what it seems in this story.

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When the humans notice that robotic defenders are coming back from the supposedly radioactive battlefield

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without being radioactive the robots have some serious explaining to do.

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In the end though its the humans who end up questioning themselves.

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Humankind has it a bit better in Blade Runner the movie based on Dicks novel

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Of course its a little hard to tell

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whos human and whos not in the world of Blade Runner since its populated with

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replicants robots who look exactly like people.

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No worries though.

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Any troublesome replicant is taken care of by your friendly neighborhood blade runner.

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With robots in the mix dystopian tropes suddenly get a lot more complicated.

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When a group of particularly troublesome replicants take cover in a futuristic L.A.

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the powers-that-be bring expert blade runner Rick Deckardaka Harrison Fordout of retirement.

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Of course Blade Runner wouldnt be a dystopian classic if it were just a robots-are

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bad-humans-are-good kind of story.

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Its a movie that really makes us think about the possible gray areas that humanity

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might have to face as robots steadily become more like us.

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When robots look and act human what does it even mean to be human Would

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some people not even know if they were robots or not Would it even matter

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You might long for the days when even if you didnt get along with your

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co-worker at least you knew they were human. NOTE end of file

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