At the Huffington Post, Maddie Crum and Maxwell Strachan ask 7 science fiction authors to hypothesize about what a dystopian Olympics might look like. While most of the authors acknowledge the influence that climate change and technology will have on the Olympics, Crum and Strachan note that the authors’ responses are surprisingly optimistic. Here’s how Malka Older, author of Infomocracy, responded:
I would like to imagine an Olympics untied from nationalism (or, what the hell, a world without nationalism!) where we would see the best athletes competing against each other, not just the best as chosen by each country. In this world nations wouldn’t take any particular pride in hosting the games, so decisions about whether or not to do so would be based on sober analyses of whom the events would benefit and whom they would harm. Or maybe we could divorce the games from corporate interests instead, so that when a country offered to host, they would be hosting with their own resources and the attendance would benefit their own enterprises. (In both these scenarios, by the way, the IOC is long defunct, probably by way of criminal prosecution.)
