This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

Why are we so drawn to dystopian visions of our future? There’s something compelling about these gritty, dirty, hopeless settings of oppressive state control that keeps us coming back to them time and time again in books, film and TV.

It’s probably schadenfreude. We see the poor downtrodden masses and think, “There but for the grace of random fluctuations in the space/time continuum go I”. Either that or we just like to get a heads up on what the real future is almost certianly going to look like.

Some of the societies listed below got grim and grimy because of circumstances way beyond people’s control, though most came about through our collective greed, ingenuity and obsession with robots. Basically we’ve only got ourselves to blame. If you don’t want your great great grandchildren to have to live in a test tube and wear steam-punk trenchcoats everywhere, act now to stop the future looking anything like this…