True subversion lies in hope. Dystopia or regeneration : learning from science fiction.
Over the past 70 years, science fiction has sold us 2025 as a nightmare: lethal game shows, climate collapse, fatal cyberattacks. Contemporary SF shows that it’s about more than predicting the fall: imagining how we recover. True subversion gives hope.
Drawn from foundational science-fiction books and research papers from the 20th and 21st centuries, on a nonexhaustive basis. Business Digest, 2025
Orwell (1984, 1949) and Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) drew two roads to hell. Orwell’s is based on fear and pervasive surveillance—a boot crushing a human face. Huxley’s is based on pleasure and comfort—voluntary submission through distraction and consumption. Since then, dystopias have been measured against this dual legacy
For more than half a century, science fiction writers have marked 2025 as a red-alert year. Climate disasters, cyberattacks, death-as-spectacle— it is all there. Today, as we live through that year, another current in SF argues the opposite: what if, after disaster it was time to rebuild? Between collapse and repair, 2025 becomes a dividing line.
#1- 2025: the year science fiction condemned us
2025: a date that sounded like science fiction until recently—and is now the present. Writers chose it as a future close enough to be credible, distant enough to justify extrapolation. In their writing, it is never a bright year. In literature, 2025 is defined by attention-consuming screens, fragmented societies, flooded cities, environmental collapse, and the virtual world displacing the physical one
No rockets to Mars, no progressive utopias: the stories set in 2025 are dystopias. They pose a blunt question: what remains when the state collapses, technology turns against us, and climate overwhelms civilization?
70 years, 7 novels, 7 visions, all dark.
Each one examines our present, with yesterday’s imagination matching today’s headlines.
The Running Man (Stephen King/Richard Bachman, 1982) makes 2025 the era of total spectacle: the poor hunted to death before an avid audience. Television and violence merge; entertainment becomes a political weapon.
With Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler, 1993) come climate and social collapse. California in flames, barricaded communities, looting. A heroine founds a new faith: “God is Change.” No utopia, only spiritual survival.
Flood (Stephen Baxter, 2008) makes disaster global. The oceans rise, London disappears, civilization sinks. An unescapabale scientific tale: no heroes, just overwhelmed human beings.
In The Peripheral (William Gibson, 2014), 2025 isn’t yet the apocalypse, but is the era of mass precarity: poverty, opioids, dead industries. Technology links this declining world to a post-disaster future: the “Jackpot.”
Cyberstorm (Matthew Mather, 2013) envisions a frozen New York cut off and without power after massive cyberattacks. A realistic thriller: without networks, everything collapses within days.
The Eye of Purgatory (Jacques Spitz, 1939) is the French variation: a painter sees the world decay before his eyes. A dark satire written in 1939, it casts 2025 as the moment when civilization is revealed as already nearing collapse.
Even RoboCop, (1989, franchise adaptation), in some story arcs, sets its corporate nightmare in 2025: full police privatization, justice in shareholders’ hands, government evaporated.
In short, the year 2025 seen by writers is saturated with fear: fear of screens, social violence, rising seas, failing networks, and decaying reality
#2- And here we are in 2025.
The visions of King, Butler, Baxter, Gibson, Mather, and Spitz overlap with ours: a destabilized climate, social media turned into arenas, gaping social divides, cybersecurity on edge. None of these authors wrote a utopia. All foresaw the fragility of our systems and the speed of collapse.
From dystopia to the screen: Jean Pormanov—or Running Man, live.
In Running Man, King showed crowds captivated by televised killing. In 2025, it’s no longer fiction: the live death of streamer Jean Pormanov reveals a society where attention is worth more than life. Viewers become accomplices, pulled into the feed, unable to stop the show. Murder as content: the point where dystopia meets our digital reality.
#3- When science fiction dares to talk about fixing
What is left to write, now that we are living that future? Perhaps shift the focus: not the foretold catastrophe, but the possible alternatives. Contemporary science fiction explores regeneration, post-growth, and the reinvention of social bonds. After dystopias, we need narratives of turning points. Not to deny disaster, but to show ways to survive it without turning it into spectacle or giving in to resignation.
2025 isn’t the end. It’s the point where fiction meets reality. And today’s writers are digging into what comes next; contemporary fiction dares to imagine a future of repair and regeneration. These works exist—and they upend forty years of apocalypse-dominated sci-fi.
Five contemporary sci-fi titles stand out.
With The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020), we’re in hardcore realism. A heatwave kills millions; the UN creates a ministry to defend future generations. Robinson doesn’t imagine an escape to Mars, but a bureaucratic and financial guerrilla campaign: taxing carbon, reforming finance, inventing green currencies. It’s dense, but credible.
The Overstory (Richard Powers, 2018) shifts the focus. More than a novel, it’s a manifesto: humanity’s survival depends on trees. Each character discovers that regeneration isn’t a human-led project but a plant alliance. The Pulitzer Prize made it a reference text: regeneration requires a change in perspective.
Semiosis (Sue Burke, 2018) goes further: what if the intelligence we must negotiate with isn’t extraterrestrial but plant-based? On a colonized planet, humans must coexist with a dominant vegetal consciousness. Regeneration becomes symbiosis—an apprenticeship in radical otherness.
New York 2140 (Robinson again, 2017), not a sunken Atlantis, but a metropolis that endures, rebuilds solidarity, and develops a cooperative economy across the canals. The city doesn’t die; it changes course.
Finally, Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1985; reprinted 2020) is a visionary work: an imagined ethnography of a post-collapse people living in an egalitarian society, connected to the land. Not a fixed utopia, but a future that resembles a return to village life, free of productivism.
Taken together, these novels mark a shift in sci-fi. Disaster is a given, but no longer a spectacle; it becomes the starting point for collective, ecological, and spiritual experiments. After forty years of dystopias, perhaps the real subversion is this: not how everything collapses, but how to begin again—differently.
The Overstory (Richard Powers) and LVMH’s biodiversity strategy
In The Overstory, trees become central characters: their survival determines ours. This shift in perspective—long-term thinking, non-humans, interdependence—echoes some recent initiatives. In 2021, LVMH launched LIFE 360, a plan targeting carbon neutrality and biodiversity protection, with commitments on wood and paper supply chains. It’s not activism, but pragmatic recognition: without forests, no raw materials, no future.
Subversion: integrate trees into corporate strategy.
Hope: see economic logic converge with ecological regeneration.
#4- Two opposing visions of the future
On one side, the 2025 dystopias with their limit: restricting imagination to disaster
On the other side, contemporary fictions of regeneration that acknowledge the chaos but refuse to dwell on it.
Between these two imaginative blocks, the difference is political. Dystopias expose; regenerations propose. One manufactures fear; the other opens possibilities. Dystopia has become routine, almost a reflex. Regeneration remains disruptive. It forces us to think about a future in which we recover, we transform our systems, we dare to believe in more than our own collapse. In a world saturated with images of apocalypse, imagining hope isn’t naive; it’s an act of resistance.
Science fiction has always had two functions: to warn and to inspire. We’ve had seventy years of warnings. The urgent task now is to inspire. Not to deny the gravity of the present, but to prove that other paths exist. Because in 2025, real subversion lies in hope.
Sources :
Research : « Studying science fiction films can help students understand the power societies have to shape our lives », Harry Dahms, The Conversation 2024
1984, George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, 1949).
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, (Chatto & Windus, 1932).
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, (1985, 2005 Penguin Books reissue).
Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (Duke University Press, 2016),
Où atterrir ? Bruno Latour (La Découverte 2017)
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