We live in glass-half-empty days. Economic uncertainty, environmental crises, interminable wars, the rise of China, and the perceived decline of the West—it all points to one ineluctable conclusion: we’re fucked. Surely this accounts for the uptick in dystopias appearing in recent science fiction. As sci-fi virtuosa Ursula Le Guin wrote in 2009, one thing the form does is “extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire.”
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Sci-fi has always been a kind of funhouse mirror for our dreams and anxieties. Maybe that’s why, in this especially anxious age, futuristic dystopias are showing up even in mainstream bestsellers by writers not usually confined to that genre ghetto—books like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Margaret Atwood’s trio of speculative novels. Tellingly, what these stories have in common is a total absence of Martians and spaceships. If the planet is going to be destroyed, they argue, we’re the ones who’ll do it. The fault lies not in our starmen, but in ourselves.
Still, the world of the play—including its terminology and codes of conduct—is vividly imagined by coauthors Patriac Coakley, Andrew Hobgood, and Evan Linder. And the raw sense of abandonment felt by the numberless is effectively reflected in 11 loud, punky songs by Chris Gingrich, Julie Nichols, and Hobgood. “Now you all know how we came to be ghosts,” the not-so-alright kids sing, “haunting this land underground.”
Through 5/26: Fri-Sat 7:30 and 10 PM, Collaboraction, Flat Iron Building, 1575 N. Milwaukee, room 336, 312-226-9633, numberless.org, $10-$25.
