The earliest examples of modern science fiction and fantasy grew naturally out of the humanist traditions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. These were times when optimism about reason, progress, and human potential ran high, and the stories reflected that worldview. Heroes were often idealized—noble figures who were brave, courteous, and spotless, the kind who might save kittens on the way to vanquishing evil. Villains, by contrast, were presented as absolute darkness: blacker than a moonless night, doing evil simply because it was their nature. This moral clarity, so characteristic of the Georgian and Victorian imagination, left little room for the grey areas of human behavior.

But the 20th century would shatter that certainty. World War I marked a philosophical and cultural turning point. The mechanized brutality of trench warfare, the collapse of empires, and the sheer scale of loss undermined the Enlightenment ideal that society was steadily evolving toward moral perfection. Humanity had not transcended violence and cruelty—it had industrialized them. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, and later existentialists such as Sartre and Camus forced people to confront uncomfortable truths: that meaning was not given but constructed, and that human beings were far more complex than neat categories of good and evil.

This shift rippled through literature. Gone were the spotless heroes of the Victorian imagination. In their place came flawed protagonists and anti-heroes—characters like Hemingway’s wounded men or the morally conflicted figures of modernist novels. In science fiction, this translated into stories where the line between hero and villain blurred. Instead of noble saviors, we found ourselves reading about characters who were compromised, uncertain, or even part of the problem. This felt closer to reality: people struggling not in clear battles of good versus evil, but in the murky waters of choice, consequence, and survival.

The philosophical disillusionment also birthed the popularity of dystopian fiction. If the Enlightenment promised utopia through reason and technology, the 20th century revealed how easily those same tools could be twisted into control, oppression, and destruction. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) imagined a society where happiness was manufactured through conditioning and drugs, stripping people of individuality. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) took it further, presenting a grim future of perpetual war, surveillance, and thought control. These works were not only reflections of their own times but warnings—demonstrating how fragile freedom could be in the face of unchecked power.

When I was younger, I sometimes daydreamed about the end of society or a zombie apocalypse. In my imagination, I would be one of the survivors, navigating the ruins of civilisation. But with the (hopefully) growing wisdom of age, I now realize that I probably wouldn’t last a day. So, what are the real lessons these stories try to teach us? Are they survival manuals for the end times, or something deeper—warnings to recognize the signs when society is no longer progressing in a positive direction? And therein lies the crux of the problem: what one observer interprets as the collapse of society, another will insist is simply the way things have always been.

Over a century later, the shadow of World War I still lingers in our stories. We no longer expect perfect heroes or purely evil villains. Instead, we recognize that every character, like every person, carries both light and darkness. This embrace of complexity has made fiction richer, more relatable, and more honest. Dystopian futures remind us of what’s at stake, while flawed heroes reflect the truth of our own struggles. Together, they echo a lesson that literature and philosophy both continue to teach: the real story of humanity is never black and white—it’s written in shades of grey.