ONE Saturday earlier this month, television viewers already creeped out by whatever twisted drama they were watching and by troubling real life news bulletins about North Korea, Trump and Brexit, found that even their advertising breaks – normally a safe space filled with shiny cars, happy families and beautiful teeth – were turning dark.

The reason was a commercial for a disturbing-looking product called the AzanaBand, billed as the world's first sensory gaming device. “Meet the #AzanaBand, a gaming accessory that may quite literally send fear through your bones,” tweeted entertainment website Den Of Geek after the ad screened on the evening of March 3.

Someone else on the social media platform helpfully posted a picture of a billboard advert for the AzanaBand which had appeared in a London tube station. Meanwhile another Twitter user, a certain Haruka Abe, had this to say: “Developed by expert gaming technologists and neuroscientists, the AzanaBand brings virtual reality gaming to life. Makes you feel pain, happiness and fear. Future of gaming?”

Maybe. But maybe also the future of television drama teasers because that's what the 'advert' actually was – a clever trailer for Kiss Me First, a new series set in a Dystopian near-future and written by Bryan Elsley, Edinburgh-born creator of Skins.

Beginning on Channel 4 and Netflix next month and blending live action with virtual world sequences, the disturbing six-part drama stars Tallulah Hadden, Simona Brown, Matthew Beard and – wait for it – Anglo-Japanese actress Haruka Abe, she of the sneaky tweet. Hadden plays 17-year-old Leila, an online gamer who finds her real life and her virtual online gaming life becoming dangerously intertwined as she investigates the disappearance of her friend, Tess (played by Brown).

But if the Kiss Me First marketing approach is new, the jarring, Dystopian ideas behind it are not. In fact they're very familiar because there's currently a glut of such dramas. Kiss Me First is the latest, but from Black Mirror to The Handmaid's Tale to ongoing sci-fi anthology series Electric Dreams, unsettling visions of a near-future in which technology, ecological disaster, economic meltdown, culture wars, political intolerance or plain old fashioned fascism have subverted the norms of civilised behaviour seem to abound. And don't we just love it?

Bryan Elsley hesitates to call his drama a Dystopian vision – “but only because I hate the word” – and instead of “near future” he prefers to say it takes place in a “heightened present” where “the internet actually works, where you can be inside a huge virtual reality game of the type that doesn't quite exist but probably will soon, and where your internet signal isn't going to drop out every ten seconds”.

But there's no denying Kiss Me First's futuristic feel, the Dystopian assumptions that underpin it, or the backdrop to its creation – a world where, in Elsley's view, “everything can be communicated instantly” making it “very hard for people to curate what is and isn't important, because in the past the curators were the television networks like the BBC and they were broadly trustworthy”.

The end result of all this, he says, is that the “weight of information and lack of trust creates this feeling that we're living in this anarchic new dawn of incorrigible forces. Trumpian America, Brexit, nationalism in Europe, the rise of Russia, China waiting in the wings – all of this stuff seems very present partly because it's communicated to us from so many sources so quickly.”

It isn't just our televisions that are filled with Dystopian visions. Last year saw the release of Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to Ridley Scott's cult 1982 adaptation of Philip K Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, famous literary visions of Dystopia such as 1984, Brave New World and It Can't Happen Here, a 1935 novel about the rise of a fascist American president called Buzz Windrip, have been re-issued and climbed to the top of the bestseller lists.

So what is it about Dystopian visions that we find so appealing – and why are there so many of them around at the moment?

At it's simplest, it's a reflection of the times we live in says Dr Rhys Williams, a lecturer at Glasgow University's School of Critical Studies and an expert in sci-fi portrayals of Utopias and their twisted opposite, Dystopias.

“Science fiction, from its beginning, has been a way to articulate the dangers and possibilities of science and technology,” he says. “But more than that it's a way of thinking about society, social relations and human organisation. And it's thinking about society and the way we live, and looking at the general direction of travel, that is causing us more and more to embrace Dystopian visions of the future – as a sort of escape from a pretty Dystopian present.”

It hasn't always been like this. In times of relative confidence, such as at the end of the 19th century and in the prosperous 1950s and early 1960s, positive societal outlooks gave rise to mostly Utopian views of the future. Today, all that has changed.

“People at the moment are very uncertain about their future, very uncertain about the path that things are taking,” says Williams. “There is a sense of hurtling towards the cliff edge, not just because of climate change but also because of things like rise of the Far Right in a number of countries, the general downward spiral of the economy. We don't live in an age where we feel like the future is golden, really. We live in an age where we see nothing but bad times ahead.”

Even the AI-promoting, technology-loving Silicon Valley billionaires who you'd think would be positive about the future are hedging their bets, he says.

“I read recently that something like 50% of Silicon valley billionaires have these hideaways in New Zealand and so on, militarised bunkers that they've bought in case of climate change apocalypse. So even the wealthiest people who are touting this technological, Utopian future, don't really believe in it. Or at least they're preparing for the worst.”

The proliferation of current Dystopian visions resonate particularly strongly with the young. To date there have been three film adaptations of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels, as well as other movies occupying the same Dystopian, dog-eat-dog universe, and the apparent popularity of those themes has even seen the minting of a new demographic tag: Generation K, the K standing for Katniss Everdeen, the redoubtable heroine of the Hunger Games trilogy.

The phrase itself was coined by British academic and economist Noreena Hertz in 2015 and was based on extensive research she undertook with teenagers. She found that this cohort feels anxious and threatened – emotions heightened by its strong attachment to technologies such as smartphones – but also desperate to stand out and hugely concerned with fairness and inequality.

“I think The Hunger Games resonates with them so much because they are Katniss navigating a dark and difficult world,” Hertz has said. “In previous generations teenagers did not think in this way … this new generation knows the world is an unequal and harsh place.”

Ultimately, however, there may be benefits to all this. If concerns for the future are causing young people to embrace Dystopian visions in the present, then Generation K could be the one to set in motion a fix. That's certainly how Bryan Elsley sees it.

“I think that they come to an inevitable conclusion that adults are totally, irretrievably f**ked up,” he says. “So Kiss Me First is an attempt at taking a very personal view of what one young woman might do if she felt that forces of evil were abroad and around her and pressing in on her, and how she reasserts her principles, her sense of what's right, her sense of truth. From an optimistic point of view, I'd like to think that's what young people are about these days.”

And if it can happen in fiction, it can happen in fact as well – and may be happening already, says Williams. “I think you can definitely draw a direct line between the popularity of Young Adult Dystopian texts and the rise in interest in what you would think of as old-fashioned socialist politics, because these Thatcherite visions of the future basically don't hold water for a lot of young people.”

So even in the teeth of a storm of Dystopian visions, there is still cause for optimism for the years ahead? “Absolutely.” So here's to the future.

10 LANDMARK VISIONS OF A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE

The Time Machine

“If a Dystopian text resonates with the audience, if they find it interesting or engrossing, it's because it speaks to fears, questions or uncertainties they have about their own place and time,” says Glasgow University science-fiction expert Dr Rhys Williams. That's certainly true of HG Wells's 1895 masterpiece, he thinks, which appears Utopian in some respects but which ultimately reflects one of the abiding concerns of the age: the clash between the working classes and the bourgeoisie, represented here by the Eloi and the Morlocks.

The Matrix

Along with stunning costumes and setting, film-makers the Wachowski Brothers borrowed chewy themes from sources as diverse as Plato, William Gibson's cult novel Neuromancer and Japanese anime Ghost In The Shell for this game-changing 1999 vision of a harsh Dystopian future. Ideas taken from it – such as the notion of a “red pill” to make someone see things as they really are – remain prevalent in political discourse today.

The Handmaid's Tale

Set against the backdrop of a totalitarian Christian theocracy which has replaced democratic government in the United States, Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel has always had its place in the pantheon. Since the election of Donald Trump, however, it has started to look eerily prophetic. An award-winning 2017 TV adaptation help cement its place in the popular consciousness. Series two lands next month.

1984

“It's about a surveillance state taken to its extreme,” says Williams. When Orwell wrote the novel in 1948 (48 is 84 is reverse) he had in mind the Stalinist regime in Russia. But after revelations about the wide-spread use of spying programmes by America's NSA and the UK's GCHQ, the story of Winston Smith and his brush with the Thought Police is equally relevant to the 21st century.

Brave New World

Though Orwell nailed the surveillance state in his famous work, it's Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel that's most applicable to the 21st century, according to Williams. In it, he says, “we are essentially enslaved by our own desires. It's like a pure commodity structure where all we do is consume and we don't think about morality or anything like that”.

The Hunger Games

American author Suzanne Collins's trilogy of novels about teenagers battling for survival in televised gladiatorial entertainment provided one of the greatest literary figures of the 21st century so far – Katniss Everdeen – and a striking metaphor for the dog-eat-dog, look-at-me world of social media. While Millennials have a posh boy wizard with a couple of soppy friends as their literary hero, members of the so-called Generation K have a tooled-up working class badass in a leather jacket.

Blade Runner

Even the weather in Ridley Scott's cult 1982 film is Dystopian and, like The Matrix, his adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel tackles some big ideas and troubling themes – not least our relationship with animals and our laying waste to the planet (in the book) and what it means to be human (in the film). Android assassin Roy Batty's death soliloquy – “I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” – is one of the most famous in cinema.

We

Part satire, part Dystopian sci-fi and a clear precursor of 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel was written in 1921 and became the first to be banned in Soviet Russia. It tells the story of a world where there are no names, only numbers, where dreams are reckoned to be a sign of mental illness, and where protagonist D-503 lives in a glass-walled apartment block watched over by the secret police.

Battle Royale

A book, a film and a manga comic – the first by author Koushun Takami, the second released in 2000, a year after publication – Battle Royale anticipates The Hunger Games by nearly a decade with its story of a group of children pitted against each other in a Dystopian, fascist near-future. Here they're dumped on an island, given weapons and told to hunt each other until only one remains. Oh, and they're all wearing explosive collars.

The Drowned World

Environmental collapse and global warming are the themes of JG Ballard's bleak 1962 novel, though the calamity is down to bad luck rather than humanity's stupidity and short-termism – it's caused by a solar flare. And Ballard being Ballard he uses the ensuing chaos and lack of order to examine how people adapt to stress and to change. Not well, as it turns out.