Writers of this class of science fiction have clearly in mind the assumptions that man can master the principles of this cause-and-effect universe and that such mastery will necessarily better the human lot.
On the other hand, the bright vision of the future has been directly stated in science fiction concerned with projecting ideal societies -- science fiction, of course, is related, if sometimes distantly, to that utopian literature optimistic about science, literature whose period of greatest vigor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia.
In Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), though written after the present flood of dystopias began, we can see the bright vision of science fiction clearly defined.

Childhood's End -- apparently indebted to Kurd Lasswitz's Utopian romance, Auf Zwei Planeten (1897), and also to Wells's Histories Of The Future, especially, The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape Of Things To Come (1933) -- describes the bloodless conquest of earth by the Overlords, vastly superior creatures who come to our world in order to prepare the human race for its next stage of development, an eventual merging with the composite mind of the universe.
Arriving just in time to stop men from turning their planet into a radioactive wasteland, the Overlords unite earth into one world in which justice, order, and benevolence prevail and ignorance, poverty, and fear have ceased to exist.
Under their rule, earth becomes a technological utopia.
Both abolition of war and new techniques of production, particularly robot factories, greatly increase the world's wealth, a situation described in the following passage, which has the true utopian ring: "Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service by the community, as roads, water, street lighting and drainage had once been.
A man could travel anywhere he pleased, eat whatever he fancied -- without handing over any money".
With destructive tensions and pressures removed men have the vigor and energy to construct a new human life -- rebuilding entire cities, expanding facilities for entertainment, providing unlimited opportunities for education -- indeed, for the first time giving everyone the chance to employ his talents to the fullest.
Mankind, as a result, attains previously undreamed of levels of civilization and culture, a golden age which the Overlords, a very evident symbol of science, have helped produce by introducing reason and the scientific method into human activities.
Thus science is the savior of mankind, and in this respect Childhood's End only blueprints in greater detail the vision of the future which, though not always so directly stated, has nevertheless been present in the minds of most science-fiction writers.

Considering then the optimism which has permeated science fiction for so long, what is really remarkable is that during the last twelve years many science-fiction writers have turned about and attacked their own cherished vision of the future, have attacked the Childhood's End kind of faith that science and technology will inevitably better the human condition.
And they have done this on a very large scale, with a veritable flood of novels and stories which are either dystopias or narratives of adventure with dystopian elements.
Because of the means of publication -- science-fiction magazines and cheap paperbacks -- and because dystopian science fiction is still appearing in quantity the full range and extent of this phenomenon can hardly be known, though one fact is evident: the science-fiction imagination has been immensely fertile in its extrapolations.
Among the dystopias, for example, Isaac Asimov's The Caves Of Steel (1954) portrays the deadly effects on human life of the super-city of the future;
James Blish's A Case Of Conscience (1958) describes a world hiding from its own weapons of destruction in underground shelters;
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1954) presents a book-burning society in which wall television and hearing-aid radios enslave men's minds;
Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s, A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959) finds men, after the great atomic disaster, stumbling back to their previous level of civilization and another catastrophe;
Frederick Pohl's "The Midas Touch" (1954) predicts an economy of abundance which, in order to remain prosperous, must set its robots to consuming surplus production;
Clifford D. Simak's "How-2" (1954) tells of a future when robots have taken over, leaving men nothing to do;
and Robert Sheckley's The Status Civilization (1960) describes a world which, frightened by the powers of destruction science has given it, becomes static and conformist.
A more complete list would also include Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" (1951), Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery (1955), David Karp's One (1953), Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence (1952), Jack Vance's To Live Forever (1956), Gore Vidal's Messiah (1954), and Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (1952), as well as the three perhaps most outstanding dystopias, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), and John Wyndham's Re-Birth (1953), works which we will later examine in detail.
The novels and stories like Pohl's Drunkard's Walk (1960), with the focus on adventure and with the dystopian elements only a dim background -- in this case an uneasy, overpopulated world in which the mass of people do uninteresting routine jobs while a carefully selected, university-trained elite runs everything -- are in all likelihood as numerous as dystopias.

There is, of course, nothing new about dystopias, for they belong to a literary tradition which, including also the closely related satiric utopias, stretches from at least as far back as the eighteenth century and Swift's Gulliver's Travels to the twentieth century and Zamiatin's We, Capek's War With The Newts, Huxley's Brave New World, E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and which in science fiction is represented before the present deluge as early as Wells's trilogy, The Time Machine, "A Story Of The Days To Come", and When The Sleeper Wakes, and as recently as Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" (1947), the classic story of men replaced by their own robots.
What makes the current phenomenon unique is that so many science-fiction writers have reversed a trend and turned to writing works critical of the impact of science and technology on human life.
Since the great flood of these dystopias has appeared only in the last twelve years, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the chief impetus was the 1949 publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, an assumption which is supported by the frequent echoes of such details as Room 101, along with education by conditioning from Brave New World, a book to which science-fiction writers may well have returned with new interest after reading the more powerful Orwell dystopia.

Not all recent science fiction, however, is dystopian, for the optimistic strain is still very much alive in Mission Of Gravity and Childhood's End, as we have seen, as well as in many other recent popular novels and stories like Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957);
and among works of dystopian science fiction, not all provide intelligent criticism and very few have much merit as literature -- but then real quality has always been scarce in science fiction.
In addition, there are many areas of the human situation besides the impact of science and technology which are examined, for science-fiction dystopias often extrapolate political, social, economic tendencies only indirectly related to science and technology.
Nevertheless, with all these qualifications and exceptions, the current dystopian phenomenon remains impressive for its criticism that science and technology, instead of bringing utopia, may well enslave, dehumanize, and even destroy men.
How effectively these warnings can be presented is seen in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Vonnegut's Player Piano and Wyndham's Re-Birth.

Easily the best known of these three novels is The Space Merchants, a good example of a science-fiction dystopia which extrapolates much more than the impact of science on human life, though its most important warning is in this area, namely as to the use to which discoveries in the behavioral sciences may be put.
The novel, which is not merely dystopian but also brilliantly satiric, describes a future America where one-sixteenth of the population, the men who run advertising agencies and big corporations, control the rest of the people, the submerged fifteen-sixteenths who are the workers and consumers, with the government being no more than "a clearing house for pressures".
Like ours, the economy of the space merchants must constantly expand in order to survive, and, like ours, it is based on the principle of "ever increasing everybody's work and profits in the circle of consumption".
The consequences, of course, have been dreadful: reckless expansion has led to overpopulation, pollution of the earth and depletion of its natural resources.
For example, even the most successful executive lives in a two-room apartment while ordinary people rent space in the stairwells of office buildings in which to sleep at night;
soyaburgers have replaced meat, and wood has become so precious that it is saved for expensive jewelry;
and the atmosphere is so befouled that no one dares walk in the open without respirators or soot plugs.

While The Space Merchants indicates, as Kingsley Amis has correctly observed, some of the "impending consequences of the growth of industrial and commercial power" and satirizes "existing habits in the advertising profession", its warning and analysis penetrate much deeper.
What is wrong with advertising is not only that it is an "outrage, an assault on people's mental privacy" or that it is a major cause for a wasteful economy of abundance or that it contains a coercive tendency (which is closer to the point).
Rather what Kornbluth and Pohl are really doing is warning against the dangers inherent in perfecting "a science of man and his motives".
The Space Merchants, like such humanist documents as Joseph Wood Krutch's The Measure Of Man and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition Of Man, considers what may result from the scientific study of human nature.
If man is actually the product of his environment and if science can discover the laws of human nature and the ways in which environment determines what people do, then someone -- a someone probably standing outside traditional systems of values -- can turn around and develop completely efficient means for controlling people.
Thus we will have a society consisting of the planners or conditioners, and the controlled.
And this, of course, is exactly what Madison Avenue has been accused of doing albeit in a primitive way, with its "hidden persuaders" and what the space merchants accomplish with much greater sophistication and precision.

Pohl and Kornbluth's ad men have long since thrown out appeals to reason and developed techniques of advertising which tie in with "every basic trauma and neurosis in American life", which work on the libido of consumers, which are linked to the "great prime motivations of the human spirit".
As the hero, Mitchell Courtenay, explains before his conversion, the job of advertising is "to convince people without letting them know that they're being convinced".
And to do this requires first of all the kind of information about people which is provided by the scientists in industrial anthropology and consumer research, who, for example, tell Courtenay that three days is the "optimum priming period for a closed social circuit to be triggered with a catalytic cue-phrase" -- which means that an effective propaganda technique is to send an idea into circulation and then three days later reinforce or undermine it.
And the second requirement for convincing people without their knowledge is artistic talent to prepare the words and pictures which persuade by using the principles which the scientists have discovered.
Thus the copywriter in the world of the space merchants is the person who in earlier ages might have been a lyric poet, the person "capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing".
As Courtenay explains, "Here in this profession we reach into the souls of men and women.
And we do it by taking talent -- and redirecting it".

Now the basic question to be asked in this situation is what motivates the manipulators, that is, what are their values?
-- since, as Courtenay says, "Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he's motivated by the highest ideals".
But the only ideal he can think of is "Sales"!
Indeed, again and again, the space merchants confirm the prediction of the humanists that the conditioners and behavioral scientists, once they have seen through human nature, will have nothing except their impulses and desires to guide them.