Return from the Stars

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea"

"Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."

different versions of The Road Goes Ever On by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Spoiler alert:
Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars is more of a gradual expansion on themes discernible from the start (reintegration, alienation, finding purpose) with no traditional grand reveal, but you might still want to read it first.

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"It was a civilization that had rid itself of fear.
[...]
For we, in the course of ten years, had gone through so many horrors, everything that was inimical to man, that wounded him and crushed him, and we had returned, sick of it, so very sick of it; any one of us, hearing that the return would be delayed, that there would be a few more months in space to endure, would probably have leapt at the speaker's throat. And now we -- no longer able to stand the constant risk, the blind chance of a meteorite hit, that endless suspense, the hell we went through when an Arder or an Ennesson failed to return from a reconnaissance flight -- we immediately began to refer to that time of terror as the only proper thing, as right, as giving us dignity and purpose.

[...]

"The public is not aware. . ."
"Of what?"
"Of the fact that the spirit of exploration is dead. That there are no expeditions, they know. But they don't think about it. They think that there are no expeditions because expeditions are unnecessary, and that's all. But there are some who see and know perfectly well what is going on, and what consequences it will have. Has already had."
"Well?"
"Pap. Pap and more pap for all eternity. No one will fly to the stars now. No one will risk a dangerous experiment now. No one will test a new medicine on himself now. What, they don't know this? They know! And if the word got out who we are, what we did, why we flew, what it was all about, then it would be impossible, you see, impossible to conceal the tragedy!""

from Return from the Stars
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Generally speaking, I see three kinds of SciFi dystopias.

The 1984 variety present a blatant shithole of a society, which only the most brutal militaristic autocracy and/or pervasive government propaganda could attempt to glorify.

The Fahrenheit 451 type aren't halfway bad for about a quarter of their inhabitants. Bread and circuses abound if you can afford them. Sure, all your neighbours are being marginalized, disenfranchised, ostracized in the classic or figurative sense, lobotomized or just plain exterminated, but if you merely crank up your drug dosage or are willing to squint hard enough, you can almost ignore the planet being gradually mismanaged into the gutter.

The Brave New World sort are objectively nice, pleasant places to live, so long as you lack any ambition beyond fleeing, feeding, fighting and fu-ornicating. Usually not even the fighting. Such tales' basic complaint is that humanity has lost that special something, that spark of humanitude, that shit-flinging ape spirit, that pioneering near-pining, that thirst for unquenchableness or, as some might tastefully venture to ad, a taste for adventure.

I don't know whether Stanislaw Lem ever wrote one of the first type. He did write at least one novella set in the second type. 1961's Return from the Stars was his stab at the third... sort of... maybe? Despite stories like Solaris or His Master's Voice reshaping entire sub-genres of SF, his various works were in themselves very difficult to pin down to a particular ideology.

Return from the Stars begins with an explorer returning from relativistic spaceflight to find Earth incomprehensibly altered after more than a century - the entire first chapter is a somewhat overextended description of the narrator lost in a... spaceport? shopping mall? he can't even tell. For all its glitz, the new human norm is revealed to consist of dystopian mind control via chemicals and indoctrination both subliminal and liminal, rendering the entire populace risk-averse to the point of catatonia. The Earth has been made a safe space. The narrator rages against such control and that's where most authors would have stopped, with the manly-man from the past trying to teach a decrepit future how to fight or possibly flight. Lem went several steps further.

Whatever the author's initial intentions for the book, it's worth noting that it somehow became at least partly a commentary on war veterans attempting to re-enter peacetime society. Don't even try to tell me that first paragraph I quoted isn't really about the glorification of WWII. Awareness that the glory of risk-taking is so often ginned up post facto serves to temper and offset the rage against enforced caution, and unlike most entertainment which glorifies the consumer's own status quo, Return from the Stars ends with the narrator allowing himself to fit his new surroundings, psychologically separating himself from the ideals of the mid 20th century. Even more astoundingly, this itself is not a blanket renunciation of exploration as an ideal. Against expectations, the chemically castrated populace of the future allots the narrator's colleagues, other former explorers, resources to restart the space program, with the implication that the old-timers are instigating some moderate degree of social change. Thus by the end the world of the future seems a great deal less dystopian, and the main thrust of the story is rather toward mental flexibility, adaptability and personal freedom, with the understanding that freedom of action implies freedom of inaction and freedom from harm implies the freedom to risk.

While worth reading in itself (despite translation difficulties) it's also a story I'd recommend not to the young but to my own age group in dealing with the young, as many scions of  the '80s and '90s attempting to communicate with snowflakes are very much cast in the role of morlocks among eloi. There's something encouraging about the narrative's willingness to find worth in a society over-ridden by a farcical, facetious, absolutist emphasis on self-castration and political correctness, without trying to make war upon it.