A recent email reminded me of a panel I was on at at Context. The subject was about making dystopias, which seems an oddly timely subject. One of the things we discussed a little bit was the fact that there can be a number of different kinds of dystopia, depending on what the author was trying to do:
Utopia, UR doin it rong: A dystopia often is someone else’s utopia looked at from another angle. In some sense Brave New World is like this. And my planet Bakunin in the Hostile Takeover and Apotheosis Trilogies is definitely a reaction to one too many happy sunny Libertarian Utopias.
I Made U an ekosystem, but I eated it: Another large subset of dystopian fiction is post-apocalyptic. The world just falls apart, and society falls apart with it. It can range from the various children of Mad Max, to Children of Men to even George Romero’s Dead films. The trigger used to be nuclear war, now it’s more likely environmental.
YR Politikz, DO NOT WANT!: Don’t like a political idea, just place it in control of the world and let it run everything to its logical conclusion. This gets you everything from Little Brother to The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s been SF about the world run (badly) by conservatives, liberals, fascists, doctors and ad-men.
U Can’t Has Freedoms, Not Yours:Akin to the above but a bit more intense. The idea is less about a political idea or trend per se, but the loss of free will. There is an existental dread of being trapped in an amoral, mechanical system that denies your humanity. Think of 1984, Brazil or THX1138.
Oops, iz sorry: Lastly, we can slide into the end of the world as we know it through sheer obliviousness. We just do what we’re doing, do more of it, and one day we’re in Fahrenheit 451, or Neuromancer.
