I don't understand that when distopian worlds are protrayed in science fiction-- they largely consist of the same qualities of medieval social structure. That is: rigid social classes, injustice, unenlightened thought, unquestioning subserviance, even a sense of sameness and uniformity (all the peasants and the preoles dress and think the same. The noblemen dress and think the same). Yet these same science-fiction hypotheticals, contradictingly, regret the loss of an earlier, pre-industrial time. The movement away from that period in history has created a strange inertia. Are we are paranoid we are still living in that restrictive/oppressed time? Is it that the less we see oppression/control in the infinite variety of liberalism we encounter today, the more we dread that oppression/control is operating invisibly in our lives? At least by depicting a distopian society, or by shallowly visualizing the past, we can see clearly what it is we fear. Of course some authors, such as Philip K., complicate that projection, and decenter our conventional moral judgements in these mental/literary/imagined places.