His short stories are often bleak - haunting, even - but they’re never cynical. Ted Chiang‘s science fiction is like Black Mirror, but also not. But it’s also irresistible, its potent insights revealing a lucidity about the unknown that’s difficult to achieve. It’s what you might call bleak, devastating or, given your tolerance for being virtually dragged to hell and back, nearly unwatchable. Black Mirror is anti-escapism - the show’s best episodes pin down real human fears and offer them as parables for a time nearing the end of the world. As of today, four seasons of the series, in addition to an interactive film ( Bandersnatch, 2018), have been released following the anthology format, it explores moments of peculiar, technofuturistic terror with an eerily realistic eye. Black Mirror, a reworking of the immortal Twilight Zone, first ran on Channel 4 in 2011 but slowly gathered notoriety and ended up on Netflix, revitalized and Americanized, in 2016.

This all isn’t to disparage escapism, but to apply a critical eye to a wider scope of science fiction stories - many of which have become popular in recent years. It’s not unlike imagining life in a new city, with the idealism of a fresh start giving way to banality once the unknown becomes routine. Science fiction and fantasy, across all art forms, is frequently a clever vessel for nostalgic escapism the fact that these wondrous places and lives are so foreign to us is intentional, the allure so potent as to be almost promising even if unachievably so. Much like a dictator’s reign becomes increasingly normalized, the proliferation of AI, flying cars, and even the end of the world will not be particularly extraordinary to those alive at the time. As much as we can be sure that the world will end someday, we might also find solace in the fact that even the most dire of circumstances will always find a way of becoming mundane. Our tendency, as a culture, to explore science fiction either as a gimmick or as a means of forecasting the apocalypse can be limiting in scope.

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