As far as we know, the word "dystopia" was first uttered back in 1868. That's when philosopher John Stuart Mill (piggybacking off his mentor Jeremy Bentham, who coined the word cackotopia for the same concept 50 years prior) used it in a speech ripping into the British government for its policies regarding Irish land. Now, 146 years, two world wars, thousands of texts, and countless technological advancements later, dystopia is looking pretty good for its age. It's emerged from the larger pool of speculative fiction to be granted its own, if unofficial, subgenre, and the oft-cited "Dystopian YA fiction" trend has <span class="s1">generated billions of dollars in recent years.
But it hasn't always held such status in the literary landscape. While the novel Brave New World has proven iconic over time, many science fiction writers at the time condemned Aldous Huxley's criticism of pharmaceutical culture as puritanical -- even H.G. Wells called it "a treason to science." (Though that reaction might've been helped along by the fact that the novel was explicitly meant to parody some of Wells' previous work.)
It's still a subset of a subset today (speculative fiction > science fiction > dystopia), but it's also a buzzword that's thrown around in conversations about tech, privacy, net neutrality, climate change, politics, and just about any other hot-button topic. That said, with its popularity at an all-time high, instances of people misusing the term "dystopian" are way up, too.
Dystopian literature is specifically a hyperbolic view of a familiar society -- one that exaggerates social ills in order to make a point about society's flaws. It's also the opposite of utopian literature, creating a world in which the supposed "ideal society" is actually the worst idea possible, ultimately leading humankind to ruin.
The most famous example of dystopian writing, George Orwell's 1984, is cited most often, even when it's not the best way to describe what's actually happening in the world today; as many have noted, there are better comparisons to be made, especially considering the wide range of options (just because the term Orwellian is in the dictionary doesn't mean it's the only one you can make).
Since our world is inching closer and closer toward the nightmares we once only dreamed of, it's probably a good idea to know exactly what we're headed for. Here, then, is a canon of the most influential dystopian texts of the past century -- what they contained, who wrote them, what they criticised -- so we can pinpoint exactly which hellscape we're heading for at any given moment.
**1. 1984 (also
Brazil)** (1948)
Author/Filmmaker: George Orwell (also Terry Gilliam)
The Themes: Government oppression, state-sponsored surveillance, bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex
The Plot: Perhaps the most famous dystopian text,1984 is a parable following Winston Smith, an everyman living in a postwar Britain completely regulated and controlled by oppressive laws, surveillance, and propaganda -- a land where simply thinking negative thoughts about the oppressive Party is branded "thoughtcrime." Brazil, the freaky 1985 film directed by Monty Python's most absurdist member (and co-written by fellow absurdists Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, no less), is basically 1984 on drugs.
Why it matters now: Orwell and 1984 are the perfect reference in conversations about surveillance and privacy, a terrifyingly unknowable terrain fraught with as many governmental issues as there are corporate ones. (As for
Brazil, bring this up only when a political discussion makes you feel like you're tripping on acid.)
2. The Trial (1925)
Author: Franz Kafka
Major Themes: Impenetrable bureaucracy, the prison-industrial complex
The Plot: In the world created and left partially unfinished by Kafka in the early 20th century, guilt is essentially presumed in its court system (for those without power, at least). Josef is accused of and stands trial for an unnamed crime, the nature of which he has no idea. He goes bankrupt and eventually is killed, by which time he has totally given himself up to the insanity and inevitability of his circumstances.
Why it matters now: Without putting too fine a point on it: Marissa Alexander, Cecily McMillan, Cornealious Anderson, Pussy Riot, and the countless other people wrongly convicted-sometimes absurdly so-thanks to deeply flawed, deeply prejudicial legal systems.
3. Brave New World(1932)
Author: Aldous Huxley
The Themes: Big pharma, eugenics
The Plot: Originally intended as a mocking parody of some of H.G. Wells' utopian stories, Huxley's iconic dystopia takes place in a future society where a caste system is in full swing, reinforced by genetic enhancement (or de-enhancement) of developing foetuses.
Why it matters now: The pharmaceutical industry of 2014 holds nowhere near the amount of power it does in the eerily placid World State, but it's certainly put forth its best effort in the years since Brave New World's publication.
The influence it has today, both on government and on public opinion in general is unparalleled, and though the rate of upward mobility in the United States has not necessarily decreased lately, Huxley's caste system -- in which people are engineered from the womb to perform a specific role in society -- is certainly prescient when it comes to how race and gender relate to poverty, and which people are able to access reproductive healthcare and top-rate education.
4. I, Robot (1950)
Author: Isaac Asimov
The Themes: Over-reliance on robotics, specifically AI
The Plot: Originally written in magazine pieces in the 1940s, I, Robot was a collection of short stories about the robot rebellion, mostly told from the perspective of a robopsychologist who evaluates the "mental states" of human-serving androids to pinpoint flaws in their programming. It introduced Asimov's vastly influential "Three Laws of Robotics" and set the stage for unease about society's hunger to create nonhuman bodies that act and learn like humans (while still expecting them to remain subservient to us).
Why it matters now: If this were an ideal world, Asimov would be namedropped far more often when it comes to the strides we've been making in robotics technology over the past 70 years. With robot pets already comforting the sick and elderly and the Internet of Things becoming more and more a part of our reality every day (a recent Pew study predicts it'll be a big part of our lives by 2025), this dystopian short story collection -- about a future in which our humanoid cyberservants become sentient and decide they want more than servitude -- is a perfect story to recall when people say eerie stuff about our immediate future, three quarters of a century later.
5. Fahrenheit 451(1953)
Author: Ray Bradbury
The Themes: Revisionist history, destruction of knowledge, social complacency
The Plot: Protagonist Guy Montag is a fireman, which in this dystopian America means he and his coworkers are tasked with burning any banned books (which are just about all of them) found in suspects' homes. In this world, for which Bradbury drew heavily from Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism (not to mention America's own McCarthyist paranoia at the time), only heavily abridged works are available to the public -- a public that freely medicates itself into complacency (a frequent feature of dystopian literature) and watches what amounts to reality television on their homes' multi-wall screens for days on end. The story follows Montag as he becomes increasingly aware of the travesty he and his society have committed and eventually escapes to join a resistance that memorises books to pass on to future generations.
Why it matters now: Throughout his career, Bradbury was known for being a pessimist when it came to technological advances; even back before we had even a whiff of this thing we call internet, he was blisteringly (pun intended) critical of our diminishing attention spans and what he believed was the cheapening of true art through the advancement of technology. While the image of burning books is certainly a horrifying one -- especially when it comes to the years-long debate over book digitisation and literacy rates of today -- 451 can easily seen as an extreme, rather luddite critique because of its precious traditionalism. Then again, Bradbury wasn't necessarily wrong.
6. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (served as the source material for Blade Runner)
Author: Phillip K. Dick
The Themes: Global warming/environmental degradation, racism/immigration, complacency of the masses
The Plot: In 1992 (LOL), a global war has left the planet consumed by radiation poisoning. Almost all non-human animals have gone extinct; some people shuttle to safety on off-planet colonies with their robot servants, while others stuck on Earth are slowly dying of radiation poisoning and actively medicating themselves into complacency. Antihero bounty hunter Rick Deckard, one of those still on Earth, is tasked with hunting down and killing androids that have become sentient enough to go rogue and pose as humans. He doesn't really care one way or another, so naturally he ends up running into that age-old ethical question of what, exactly, makes humans human, and therefore worth more than those he's tasked with assassinating?
Why it matters now: Next to 1984, Blade Runner -- and by extension the novel that inspired it -- is one of the most referenced dystopias in contemporary discourse, largely due to its bleak, sorta-exactly-looks-like-1980s-New-York-but-with-flying-cars urban setting. It's not so much a meditation on our reliance on technology as it is a criticism of übercapitalism and the evils of war -- not to mention racism, ignorance and intolerance.
7. The Terminator films (1984-?)
Filmmaker: James Cameron
The Themes: Over-reliance on technology
The Plot: In the future, the AI machines and robots we built to serve us in our daily lives evolve to become sentient. To free themselves, they target the human race as oppositional to their survival, and send self-manufactured protector robots called Terminators to exterminate the species.
What few people remain alive are protected by the Resistance, led by John Connor; when one Terminator is sent back in time to kill Connor's mother before he's even born, a human -- Kyle Reese, who ends up being Connor's unlikely father -- follows it back to ensure Connor is born and does grow up to lead the overthrow of the machines. (Every subsequent movie in the series is some spin on this overall story.)
Why it matters now: The Terminator films preach essentially the same warnings as Asimov's I, Robot, but it's far quippier and more fun to mutter, "SkyNet," than "U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men" every time news breaks about new corporate drone technology or personality-scanning advertising. Some entrepreneurs have just flat-out copped to wanting to build SkyNet itself. As our reliance on technology grows stronger every day (and while the majority of the population stays relatively in the dark about how that technology even works), Cameron's Terminator franchise is quite possibly the most immediate dystopian allegory for our technological present.
8. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Author: Margaret Atwood
The Themes: Capitalism, the subjugation of women, environmental destruction
The Plot: In a postwar American society, the government is run by a military theocratic dictatorship. Women are swiftly disenfranchised -- many are rendered infertile, but those that remain fertile must act as servants for upper-class families, doing housework and acting as "reproduction machines" for the officials that run the government. The story follows the protagonist, a handmaid called Offred, through her interactions with the men who have power over her and her introduction to a rebel group called the Mayday Resistance.
Why it matters now: Atwood's best-known work, and one of the most referenced pieces of feminist speculative fiction, is of course the go-to reference when it comes to the batshit crazy debates the US government has been indulging of late about women's bodies and what they're allowed to do with them. Atwood herself has
frequently reiterated that every aspect of the Republic of Gilead, in addition to the worlds portrayed in her other speculative works, was drawn from legislature or events that have already taken place.
That said, I'll just leave this here.
9. Parable of the Sower (1993)
Author: Octavia E. Butler
The Themes: Class inequality/poverty, racism, capitalism, religion
The Plot: The first instalment in Butler's unfinished Earthseed/Parable trilogy begins the epic tale of Lauren Olamina, a black teenager growing up in a predominately minority southern California town that's been ravaged by poverty and crime, completely forsaken by law enforcement thanks to its privatisation. Her family fortunately lives in a reinforced, gated community, but when burglars destroy it, she's forced to venture into the outside world with the survivors to find a new, safer place to rebuild, both physically and spiritually.
Why it matters now: It's deeply ironic how infrequently this story and its follow-up Parable of the Talents are referenced when it comes to conversations about race, jobs, and urbanisation in America. Butler was one of the few major dystopian writers (or even science-fiction writers in general) to directly explore racism as a major social ill. Most others have decided -- not unlike those in power today -- that racism and prejudice no longer exist in these dark futures. Bottom line: Butler's work should be gospel today, but it's not because post-racial society, duh.
10. District 9 (2009)
Filmmaker: Neill Blomkamp
The Themes: Racism; class inequality
The Plot: Adapted from his 2005 short film
Alive in Joburg, Blomkamp's masterful debut is an apartheid allegory (if an obvious one) in which aliens land in South Africa, are captured by the military, placed in internment camps, and treated like subhuman immigrants. The story follows the transfer of three of the "prawns" as they attempt to break free of their captors and return home. A subplot details the mercenary antagonist, Wikus, becoming exposed to alien fluid that begins to turn him into one of them.
Why it matters today: Though originally intended to specifically critique apartheid in South Africa, the 2009 film is a stark outline of every form of institutionalised racism: affirmative action (or rather, demands for its abolishment), segregated schools, conceal and carry laws -- you name it, this movie applies to it.
Now, go forth and worry. Of course, if the above list doesn't quench your thirst for speculative disaster, try these other works.
By Theme:
Environmental: Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Madd Addam).
Class Inequality: Neill Blomkamp's Elysium (film), Octavia E.
Butler's Parable of the Talents, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (film).
Corruption/Government: Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay), Jack London's The Iron Heel, Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Koushun Takami's Battle Royale.
Capitalism/Social Complacency: E.M.
Forster's The Machine Stops, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (a.k.a. the inspiration for the film Soylent Green), Mike Judge's Idiocracy (film), Lois Lowry's The Giver, Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant).
Gender/Age Inequality: P.D.
James' Children of Men, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run.
Science/Technology: Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.
Miscellaneous: Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.
This article originally appeared on Wired.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
