Dystopia

Although usually set in the future, typically the near future, dystopian fictions invariably reflect the concerns and fears of the writer's contemporaneous culture. As a given fear fades over time, dystopias founded upon it lose their ability to disturb (e.g., Burdekin's Swastika Night: the possibility of a world dominated and controlled by the Nazis, powerfully affective in 1937, has lost its force since the end of World War II). The reverse is also true, in cases where reality has caught up with ideas that were once utterly fantastic. Arguably, Huxley's Brave New World is a more powerful dystopia now than when published in 1932, given that genetic engineering, use of designer drugs, and relentless vapid entertainment media have evolved from fictions to facts. The shifting foci of dystopias display the changing philosophical preoccupations of the late twentieth century, revealing through grim fictions what their creators feared and wished to prevent.

Three interrelated trends have dominated dystopian fiction since the 1970s, although prefigurations of all three emerged before that time. The first is a concern over technological advances progressing beyond human ability to manage them effectively, if at all. As with the eponymous Machine in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) and the computer EPICAC in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), several dystopias have shown societies turned horrific as people cede responsibilities to machines, or in which repressive regimes seize and hold power through deployment of advanced technologies. Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966, filmed in 1973 as Soylent Green) shows an overpopulated Earth dependent on government-sanctioned cannibalism, while Philip Dick's 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner by Ridley Scott in 1982) questions whether an individual's humanity inheres in biology or in behavior. In Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), deliberate genetic manipulation (including discrimination based on DNA) produces a population in which undesirable characteristics cannot emerge. The Terminator trilogy (The Terminator, 1984; Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003) shows a terrifying world in which a self-aware computer works to eliminate the human race. The Matrix trilogy (The Matrix, 1999; The Matrix Reloaded, 2003; The Matrix Revolutions, 2003) envisions a postapocalyptic society in which humans have been spared solely to provide energy for the dominant machines—and are kept ignorant through a collective hallucination, the Matrix.

The postapocalyptic dystopia allows the writer to sweep away the complexities of civilization and concentrate instead on small groups of survivors—often showing them struggling to re-create the very circumstances that originally brought on apocalypse. Because these fictions tend to take place far in the future, they sometimes fail to be understood as dystopias. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) broke this ground early. Other examples of postapocalyptic dystopias include Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (published 1969, filmed by L. Q. Jones in 1975), Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002). Though the first of George Miller's Mad Max movies was little more than a series of chase scenes, the second and third installments (Mad Max II: The Road Warrior, 1981; Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985) are clearly dystopian: chaos reigns, the strong dominate the weak, and scarce commodities like gasoline are prized far more than human life. Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's collaboration on V for Vendetta (1998) presents an Orwellian postapocalyptic England in graphic novel format.

The most intriguing development since the 1970s has been the proliferation of dystopian fictions exploring gender issues. Early examples include Thomas Berger's Regiment of Women (1973) and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). Suzy McKee Charnas's four-volume Holdfast Chronicles began with the publication of Walk to the End of the World in 1974, continued with Motherlines in 1978 and The Furies (1994), and concluded in The Conqueror's Child (1999). Set long after a global environmental catastrophe that has destroyed civilization, Charnas's fiction presents an oppressive patriarchal village (the Holdfast), a nomadic culture of women who can reproduce without men (the Riding Women) and a group of ex-slave women who have escaped the Holdfast (the Free Fems). All of these groups are presented as morally defective: in the changing relationships between them, Charnas suggests that oppression and using power for its own sake are intrinsic human flaws, irrespective of gender. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) largely agrees, but acknowledges that women, children, and ethnic minorities suffer most during social upheaval. Butler's dystopia revolves around Lauren Olamina, a young black woman who suffers from hyperempathy. As American civilization decays, Lauren leads a small group of refugees to safety while instructing them in her self-created religion, "Earthseed." But the sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), shows the Acorn community destroyed and its people killed or enslaved by fundamentalist Christians. Lauren is forced to choose between rescuing her followers (including her daughter) and saving Earthseed from destruction.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (a film version appeared in 1990) is much more narrowly focused on a patriarchal dystopia in which fertile women are reduced to breeder-slaves. Offred, Atwood's first-person narrator, only dimly understands how the ultra-fundamentalist Republic of Gilead has come to be, but she gives a firsthand look into the horribly repressive techniques necessary to keep the oligarchs (Commanders) in power. The first two of Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue novels (Native Tongue, 1985; Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose, 1987) create a patriarchal but not overtly religious dystopia, one in which a few hundred Linguists are responsible for all communication between humanity and dozens of alien races; while all of humanity hates the Linguists, it is the Linguist women who are even more thoroughly oppressed. Elgin foregrounds the feminist concern with language as a tool of patriarchal repression, and she shows her Linguist women building a "women's language," Láadan, intended to be the tool of their liberation.