Maybe I’m generalizing from one example here, but every time I’ve imagined a fictional scenario where something I felt strongly about escalated implausibly into warfare, I’ve later realized that it was a symptom of an affective death spiral, and the whole thing was extremely silly.
That’s not to say a short story about a war triggered by supposedly-but-not-actually dangerous knowledge couldn’t work. But it would work better if the details of the knowledge in question were optimized for the needs of the story, which would mean it’d have to be fictional.
There are a stories about dangerous knowledge and stories about censorship gone mad, but I can’t think of one where the reader theirself isn’t sure which it is.
There’s a related concept in the stage production Urinetown, where the draconian controls of the police state turn out to have been necessary all along; and the Philip K. Dick short story The Golden Man, where the government’s brutal crackdown on mutants and sadistic experimentation are defied by a lone researcher, directly leading to implied cosmic waste.
But the closest story I can think of to ambiguous censorship is Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, where the protagonist controls some Langford Basilisks; and censorship per se doesn’t play a big part in the plot.
There’s a related concept in the stage production Urinetown, where the draconian controls of the police state turn out to have been necessary all along
As a musical, Urinetown is okay, but its premise does not make sense. They have somehow managed, in spite of the water shortage and the wherewithal to institute massive societal change to manage it, to continue using restroom facilities that cost water, and they only don’t all die because they charge money to use those facilities, as though this will affect how much waste a person produces. This is all instead of a water-free facility, or better yet, reclamation.
And given that the Haber-Bosch process requires water (to produce the hydrogen gas), it seems a little stupid to ban public urination rather than simply insisting they urinate on trees or into buckets for their farmers to use.
Maybe I’m generalizing from one example here, but every time I’ve imagined a fictional scenario where something I felt strongly about escalated implausibly into warfare, I’ve later realized that it was a symptom of an affective death spiral, and the whole thing was extremely silly.
That’s not to say a short story about a war triggered by supposedly-but-not-actually dangerous knowledge couldn’t work. But it would work better if the details of the knowledge in question were optimized for the needs of the story, which would mean it’d have to be fictional.
There are a stories about dangerous knowledge and stories about censorship gone mad, but I can’t think of one where the reader theirself isn’t sure which it is.
There’s a related concept in the stage production Urinetown, where the draconian controls of the police state turn out to have been necessary all along; and the Philip K. Dick short story The Golden Man, where the government’s brutal crackdown on mutants and sadistic experimentation are defied by a lone researcher, directly leading to implied cosmic waste.
But the closest story I can think of to ambiguous censorship is Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, where the protagonist controls some Langford Basilisks; and censorship per se doesn’t play a big part in the plot.
As a musical, Urinetown is okay, but its premise does not make sense. They have somehow managed, in spite of the water shortage and the wherewithal to institute massive societal change to manage it, to continue using restroom facilities that cost water, and they only don’t all die because they charge money to use those facilities, as though this will affect how much waste a person produces. This is all instead of a water-free facility, or better yet, reclamation.
And given that the Haber-Bosch process requires water (to produce the hydrogen gas), it seems a little stupid to ban public urination rather than simply insisting they urinate on trees or into buckets for their farmers to use.
The Pillowman and The Metal Children, both recent plays, come to mind.