At the recent Storymakers conference, I taught a class on Writing Dystopia. This week I’ll be turning that class into a series of blogs:

Monday: Defining Dystopia
Tuesday: History of Dystopia
Wednesday: Elements of Dystopia
Thursday: Elements of the Dystopian Hero
Friday: Social Commentary in Dystopian Fiction

In this final installment of the dystopian blog series, I want to talk about the social commentary that is inherent to dystopian fiction.

On Tuesday we talked about how dystopia is reactionary; it looks at a social problem and extrapolates that problem to its frightening extreme. When looking at the origins of almost any dystopia, the authors often frankly coming upon a troubling subject and then imagining how the world would be different if that subject became more and more prevalent:

From Ally Condie, about Matched:

“The real catalyst was a conversation I had with my husband about marriage in the fall of 2008. He posited the question: What if someone wrote the perfect algorithm for lining people up, and the government used it to decide who you married, when you married, etc.?”

Publishers Weekly wrote about Suzanne Collins inspiration for The Hunger Games:

Collins says the idea for the brutal nation of Panem came one evening when she was channel-surfing between a reality show competition and war coverage. “I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way.” She also cites the Greek myth of Theseus, in which the city of Athens was forced to send 14 young men and women into the labyrinth in Crete to face the Minotaur. “Even as a kid, I could appreciate how ruthless this was,” Collins recalled. “Crete was sending a very clear message: ‘Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.’ ”

Some authors take it a step further, where the social problem is not just the inspiration, but the author specifically wants to make a political/philosophical point:

Ray Bradbury wrote about Fahrenheit 451:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women’s Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

The New York Times wrote about Ayn Rand’s inspiration for Atlas Shrugged:

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

Almost every dystopia fits this mold: taking a current problem and extrapolating upon it. Uglies addresses body image. Brave New World is about our disposable consumer culture and our obsession with hedonistic pleasure and entertainment. We talks about conformity and Communism.

Going all the way back to our Monday topic, I really think that this social commentary is an integral part of the definition of a true dystopia. A book with a vaguely dystopian setting, but which lacks this distinct issue-based element, is probably a different genre altogether: sci-fi, or post-apocalypse, or something else.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week-long blog series. I’ve definitely enjoyed writing it. I know I’ve defined things pretty narrowly, and that some people have broader definitions; I’d love to hear your thoughts.

At the recent Storymakers conference, I taught a class on Writing Dystopia. This week I’ll be turning that class into a series of blogs:

Monday: Defining Dystopia
Tuesday: History of Dystopia
Wednesday: Elements of Dystopia
Thursday: Elements of the Dystopian Hero
Friday: Social Commentary in Dystopian Fiction

We’re now diving into some of the more specific elements of the dystopia genre. Obviously, not all of these elements are present in every dystopian, but, generally, these are so common/important in dystopian fiction that they almost define the genre.

Warning! There will be a couple of minor spoilers as I give examples, but they’re almost all from classics of the dystopian genres that you’ve all likely read or heard about.

• The society/social structure plays an enormous role in the story. I would say that, of all the elements listed here, this one is the most essential to a true dystopia. A society in a dystopia is never merely a backdrop; it is a driving force to both character and plot. I’d go so far as to say that if you’ve created a society that isn’t a central element to your story, then your book probably isn’t dystopian: it’s likely sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic, or cyber-punk or something else.
• Strong elements of control, and lack of certain freedoms. As we talked about on Monday, a true dystopia is a utopia with a fatal flaw. Generally, it is that flaw that allows for the utopia: constant surveillance (lack of privacy) ensures complete safety; lack of individual choices allows for the society to make decisions that benefit the group as a whole. In The Hunger Games, the lack of freedom came in the form of mandated entry into the games, and the games were used as a propaganda machine to control and dominate the outer districts.
• Restricted information. This is more obvious in some dystopians, like 1984, where the protagonist’s job is to edit and alter history, or in Fahrenheit 451, where the firemen burn books for the “good of humanity”. But while other dystopias may not be as overtly concerned with censorship or historical revisionism, almost all of them control information, often hiding it from the public. The title character in The Giver is one of the only people to know the history of their society. In Uglies, characters don’t know the negative consequences of what happens when they are made into Pretties (and those negative consequences only increase the society’s ability to hide information).
• Citizens/characters are dehumanized to some extent. In many dystopias, not only are freedoms taken away, but many of the elements of humanity are taken away as well. In The Giver, the citizens have lost the ability to experience pleasure or pain. In Brave New World, citizens are encouraged to take drugs to pacify and distract them. In The Hunger Games, teens are forced to kill. In We, citizens wear identical clothes and have numbers instead of names, losing much of their personal identity.
• Conformity. Individuality and dissension are bad/immoral/illegal. In all of these societies, the state/government acts with totalitarian control. While some citizens may ostensibly have more freedom than others, none can freely oppose the philosophies of the regime. The government will act swiftly to ensure that one bad apple doesn’t rule the entire barrel, either through “re-education” (as in 1984),  imprisonment, execution, or something similar (characters in We get lobotomized for speaking out).
• There is the illusion of a perfect world. The ultimate goal of the society, through all of the above elements, is to create a world that is peaceful/stable/equal/etc. And in most dystopias, there is a large portion of the population who believes that the society has succeeded, that this is a utopia. One of my very favorite elements in Matched is that, unlike many dystopians, even until we get to the last few chapters (of the first book) the main character really doesn’t see the society as evil and wrong. It’s the only world she’s known, and though she may be discovering disturbing truths, it takes a long time for her to even conceive of the idea that the society as a whole might be bad (rather than have a few isolated problems). Even in The Hunger Games, which starts from an outsider’s (Katniss’s) perspective, we can see that the people in The Capitol view their society as idyllic–they don’t even recognize how horrible the games are.

Again, not all of these need to be present to have a dystopia, but these are all very common and important to the genre. (Going back to definitions, I think using these elements as a guidepost, rather than the vague “bad place” definition, will be much more useful if you’re thinking of writing a dystopia.)

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At the recent Storymakers conference, I taught a class on Writing Dystopia. This week I’ll be turning that class into a series of blogs:

Monday: Defining Dystopia
Tuesday: History of Dystopia
Wednesday: Elements of Dystopia
Thursday: Elements of the Dystopian Hero
Friday: Social Commentary in Dystopian Fiction

Yesterday we talked a little about the definition of dystopia, and today we’re going to talk about where dystopian fiction came from.

Before dystopia, we had utopia. Although the term comes from Thomas More’s book, Utopia, and is translated in that context as “no place”, utopian fiction had been around long before he put his name on it–all the way back to The Garden of Eden (and other paradise legends). Essentially, utopian fiction is stories of places where life and society are significantly better than the real world.

It was Plato who took it a step further, purposely creating a hypothetical society that ran according to his philosophical ideals. This concept is reflected in both Plato’s Republic, and his Timaeus and Criteas (both about Atlantis). I’ve read all three of these–The Republic for school, and the Atlantis books for a writing project that didn’t go anywhere–and let me tell you: DELIGHTFUL.

The problem with reading utopian fiction, from a modern perspective, is that it lacks one crucial element to good (modern) storytelling: conflict. These books–even More’s Utopia–are essentially academic. They present a theoretical world as a social commentary.

It’s not surprising then that dystopia is a reaction to utopia. In the 1500s and 1600s, utopian stories were the hot trend, and most followed a simple formula: a traveler gets lost, finds an unknown civilization and learns how they live, and then the traveler comes back home to tell everyone about great it was. It was in about 1605 when Joseph Hall wrote Mundus Alter Et Idem, the first dystopia, which used the same formula but with very different results: the traveler visited the lands of Crapulia (gluttons), Viraginia (nags), Moronia (fools) and Lavernia (theives). The book was satire, pointing a finger both at utopian fiction but also at many of the current social conventions.

And really, that’s the whole point of both utopian and dystopian fiction. Utopian fiction looks at current social problems and imagines how they could be fixed. Dystopian fiction looks at current social problems (and social “successes”) and imagines how they could get horribly worse.

It’s worth noting that even in the modern era, dystopia continues to be a reaction to utopian ideals. Some cases are very specific: Brave New World, a classic of modern dystopia, was written almost as a parody of H.G. Wells’ utopian novel Men Like Gods. But really, almost all dystopian novels take an idea that many might consider new and innovative and great and show how it could go wrong. Take Ally Condie’s Matched, for instance: her society is based on technological advances in psychoanalysis and genetic testing, positing that science can understand us so well that it can make better choices (about who we marry, or what career we pursue) than we can. Ally takes that ostensibly positive idea and illuminates the dark consequences.

I’ve speculated a few times on the blog about where the current rise in dystopian fiction is coming from and, while I’m not ready to commit to a firm theory, if there’s one thing that’s been historically clear about dystopia: it’s a reactionary genre for a dissatisfied audience.

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At the recent Storymakers conference, I taught a class on Writing Dystopia. This week I’ll be turning that class into a series of blogs:

Monday: Defining Dystopia
Tuesday: History of Dystopia
Wednesday: Elements of Dystopia
Thursday: Elements of the Dystopian Hero
Friday: Social Commentary in Dystopian Fiction

At LTUE (Life, The Universe and Everything, Science Fiction Symposium) this spring, I was on a panel of authors talking about dystopia, and we spent forty of the fifty minutes simply trying to define what dystopia is. Even after forty minutes we didn’t agree—we just decided to move on.

I think there are two big reasons that dystopia is so hard to define. The first is that some people confuse the definition of the word with the definition of the genre. The literal Greek translation of the word ‘dystopia’: “dys” meaning “bad” and “topia” meaning “place”, so some people claim that any book set in a bad place is a dystopia. I disagree with this definition pretty strongly. That makes as much sense as saying that the mystery genre is any book that contains a mystery, or that the romance genre is any book that contains romance. (I also think that defining dystopian fiction very broadly is also kind of useless from a practical standpoint, because it becomes so vague that it’s impossible to talk about, even in generalities.)

The second reason that dystopia is hard to define is because it has become a very hot trend, particularly in YA, and therefore publishers and marketers are eager to cash in on the popularity—they slap the dystopia label on almost anything. Consequently, books like The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Road sometimes get classified as dystopian literature, even though they’re quite obviously a different genre altogether: post-apocalypse.

(Very related side-note: if you look at the sidebar of my blog, you’ll see that even I hypocritically do this. My short bio says Variant is “dystopian-ish”. That’s because even though I personally wouldn’t define Variant as a true dystopia, it has enough dystopian elements that I can see the benefit of calling it such.)

So, for the sake of this week’s blog series, I’ll be defining dystopia more narrowly. The definition I prefer is: Utopia with a fatal flaw. Think of all the classic dystopias—1984, Brave New World, The Giver, etc.. These novels all show worlds that attempted to create a perfect society, but that “perfection” was attained at a horrible cost.

There’s obviously more to a true dystopia than just that, but “utopia with a fatal flaw” is a good starting point. Tomorrow I’ll talk a little about the history of dystopia—where it started and how it’s changed.

Did you notice I’m giving away a KINDLE!? And also $125 in Amazon gift cards!? That’s like a REAL utopia, or whatever! (Click here for more info.)