Dystopia

Dystopias are the other side, and seem to be a more recent development, perhaps reflecting our recently-developed ability to destroy the planet and exterminate our own species entirely – a whole subset of the genre looks at post-nuclear war scenarios – and they have a rather different purpose from utopias: they are written to warn…

To create a dystopia, a writer extrapolates from some currently trend or possibility. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was usually the danger of planet-wide atomic war; in the 1970s and 1980s, ecological disasters and overpopulation emerged as themes. Extrapolation accepts that x is currently happening, and imagines what the situation might be like in y years if nothing changes in human behaviour… there are 7+ billion people on the planet now, what happens when there are far more? Global warming is having x effect now, what will the situation be like in y years if nothing is done to address the issue?

Clearly, a dystopia is easier to imagine, and to write, with none of the difficulty of imagining how we might get from our now to the perfection of a utopia, for instance; you just carry on regardless…

The value of writers writing to warn as well as entertain, using imagination, is important: scientists and experts can write official reports warning of x disaster if y is not done at once, or over the next z years, but a reader’s response and reaction to fiction is rather different; dry and dusty officialspeak is replaced by the imagination, the bringing to life of a particular scenario, peopled by humans with whom we may identify and empathise, as we see ourselves in their situation

If utopia is an attempt to visualise a perfect society or world, then perhaps dystopia imagines the worst possible world, though not necessarily for everyone. Disaster and/or oppression may be ecological, nuclear, political, social or religious. Let’s consider some key examples (and, as I write, I realise that I shall reserve the post-nuclear apocalypse scenario for a later post of its own).

Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia for all women in the imagined society of Gilead (future USA), who are merely vessels for reproduction. Arguably, it is a utopia for some of the men, particularly those in power or with privilege. And yet, as the story progresses, it’s clear that it isn’t, as the creators of that society have managed to banish intimacy for everyone, and the coda to the novel makes it clear that the society eventually collapsed. A similar novel, in which the state – this time in Britain – takes control of women’s reproductive capacity can be found in Benefits, by Zoë Fairbairns.

A forgotten, but chilling warning from 1937, Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin, imagines what the world would look like seven centuries after a Nazi conquest of the world.

The archetypal political dystopia is probably George Orwell‘s 1984, although it resembles a much earlier Soviet dystopia, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in which everyone also is reduced to a number, and surveillance is facilitated by everyone living in transparent buildings. Orwell’s dystopia is more complex, as is its visionary history: in the actual years prededing 1984 the novel acquired a bogeyman effect as everyone feared the world really would turn out that way; consequently the novel seemed really dated when the times didn’t develop according to the prophecy. More recently, with the revelations of our surveillance society, perhaps Orwell’s’ world is coming into its own again?

And then, there’s Brave New World, a utopia or a dystopia or both, depending on your perspective…(for more on this novel, see my previous post).

What dystopias have in common is writers warning against removal of freedom: what we must think further about is that it’s our Western freedom to, with its focus on individual self-expression, rather than a freedom from, which much of the rest of the less privileged world might be rather more interested in. Our fetishistic, capitalist freedom facilitates consumption and profit, with a circumscribed individual freedom as a side-effect, whereas freedom from, say, violence, hunger, homelessness, unemployment would probably lead to the greater happiness of far more people. But that’s another story…