Dystopias

I have enjoyed dystopian literature since well before it became a subgenre, or I knew how to describe it using that term. My first love was 1984, a brilliant book about a dark future of government control and hopeless rebellion. Animal Farm was in the same vein, but lighter and more of a fable. The Giver probably marks the more recent start of the trend toward dystopia, and is an utterly charming book. The moment when the boy first sees something different in the apple is etched forever in my memory, a mind-blowing event and a brilliant way to capture the nature of that particular dystopia. The Hunger Games of course rocketed dystopia to the top of popular culture, and is unrivaled among series dystopias.

I love books that can create alternative realities, and perhaps I am drawn particularly to dystopias because they are often explicitly political. The bleak futures involve authoritarian governments, usually engaged in severe repression, sometimes violently. In this way, they are perhaps more realistic than most fantasy/science fiction. When I wrote my book report on 1984 in 11^th grade, I argued that such a world might in fact be in our future. My teacher responded that such a world had already been created. We were both right. I was well aware of the terror that was the Soviet Union, the closest we have come to 1984 on Earth, but our society did not yet have the technology to gain control in such a totalizing way. The Soviets could not observe every movement of every subject; one day, that might be possible. But they certainly built an everyday dystopia. Such dystopias continue to exist. Descriptions of North Korea boggle the imagination: the average height of North Koreans is a few inches shorter than that of South Koreans, just 60 years after the country split, with the same genetic pool. Stories of prison camps and the absence of food are the stuff of nightmares.

Hence, it frequently surprises me that people express surprise when dystopian novels take the nearly inevitable political turns. People seemed to think The Hunger Games were about Katniss; they turned out to be about control and rebellion. Of course. Reviews of Divergent often express the same sentiment: a supposed “plot twist” occurs 80 percent of the way through. It’s the same event as in many dystopias: the character who doesn’t quite fit in while interacting with a few becomes the center of the social rebellion of the many. This is also the genius of dystopias: they translate systematic terror into the personal and the individual; they make it intelligible and compelling.

Some build these imagined worlds much better than others. I admire most those books that capture something fundamental about humanity while constructing these alternative worlds. Building strange realities can makes us more easily see who we are.