last one to die please turn out the lights

Upon discovering Lauren's condition of "hyperempathy," through which she feels the pain of others (quite literally, as it turns out), it occurred to me that each imagined future we have examined in the course thus far contains some supernatural or science-fictiony element. You may be saying "duh" to yourself right now. But it is strange to me that even the more realistic expressions of the future have in them something that is outside the realm of human possibility.

Though Neuromancer presented perhaps the most radically altered version of future-earth, the cyberspace and AI in the novel are not out of the question in terms of what someday could be real. But Lathe of Heaven, whose future-earth seems much more like our current one than Neuro, has effective dreams, and Parable, which also feels quite real (in the sense of not science-fictiony) in its depiction of the future, has a neurological condition that causes one to experience another human's (or animal's) physical pain. Neither of these are possible. What is it about dystopian/futuristic writing and film that inspires such inventions, such ideas that cannot be true in our real world?

(Children of Men's dystopia seems rather realistic as well, but is based upon the sudden and unexplainable sterility of all of mankind.)

It was interesting to track the progress of Parable's allegory of a freedom train - heading north, towards freedom, escaping slavery. Jill and Allie were sex-slaves, Emery a company-slave, Zahra a former slave to her husband. The diversity of the group was striking: black, white, hispanic, and by the end of the novel when Emery joins the Earthseed clan, a half-black half-Japanese. The clan does find freedom, or at least hope, in the end: the creation of the Acorn community, a utopian-like vision, amidst such a hellish, dystopian earth.