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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 th