Dystopia

The utopia reached its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century. As the proud confidence of the nineteenth century crumbled when faced with the horrors of the twentieth, the utopian impulse has faltered, and dystopia has grown to be the more vital and relevant of the two genres. Dystopia began to evolve as a separate literary genre late in the nineteenth century as writers published anti-utopian "answers" and "replies" attacking utopian works. Edward Bellamy's highly popular socialistic utopia Looking Backward (1888) incited such direct refutations as Richard Michaelis's Looking Further Forward (1890) and Conrad Wilbrandt's Mr. East's Experiences in Mr. Bellamy's World (1891). Other writers attacked Bellamy's utopian ideals without targeting Looking Backward directly, and in so doing produced much more absorbing fiction. Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) and Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907) reverse the utopian dream of ideal society by creating repressive totalitarian oligarchies determined to hold power at any cost. H. G. Wells wrote on both sides of the divide. Like Bellamy, Wells attracted direct "replies" with such utopian fictions as When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) (revised and reprinted in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes) and A Modern Utopia (1905), but unlike Bellamy, Wells also wrote anti-utopian fiction, including The First Men in the Moon Film still from Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies. Based on H. G. Wells's novel The Shape of Things to Come, the Ultimate Revolution (1933), this film adaptation was one of the first to depict a dystopian society. THE KOBAL COLLECTION (1901), The War in the Air (1908) and The Shape of Things to Come, the Ultimate Revolution (1933). Wells's influence on dystopian fiction has been more substantial than Bellamy's. Writers wishing to deconstruct Wells's assumptions of human social perfectibility aided by technological innovation (such as E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Orwell) found it impossible to fully do so in mere parodies or refutations, so instead they wrote standalone fictions that depict the horrid, repressive societies that they believed would arise if Wells's ideas were carried to their ultimate conclusions.