The Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction: An Exploration into Dystopian Fiction and its Influence By Divya Balain Dystopian fiction paints a futuristic society that is oppressed by tyranny - often apocalyptic. The novel’s world can be seen as prophetic for the direction of our own society or act as a warning; it often focuses on and exaggerates the negative and frightening elements of the world. The term dystopia is translated as a “not-good place” and was used as an antonym for utopia by John Stuart Mill in 1868. Dystopian fiction has been a popular genre since the 20th century, and in recent times young adult dystopian novels have topped best-seller rankings, showing how the genre resonates with a large demographic of readers. In order to understand why dystopian novels are so influential and why, as a genre, dystopian fiction is so popular today, it is important to understand the key themes that are central to it. One tenet of the genre is that the society constructed provides a reflection of today’s society, albeit in a distorted way. This allows dystopian fiction authors to be able to provide a critique of society that feels in some way plausible – due to the fact that it is rooted in the contemporary society and culture of the author and readership. Therefore, the impactful nature of dystopian novels can perhaps be attributed to the fact that they are ultimately rooted in the flaws of our own society; we can recognise these flaws as they are amplified and extended. For example, in one of the most classic dystopian novels George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), Orwell addresses political issues and exaggerates fears we have such as government surveillance, totalitarianism and censorship by crafting aspects of his novel to play on these fears – features like the thought police, the omnipresent surveillance, the rewriting of history. This amplification of our own fears results in the unsettling, unnerving atmosphere of the novel. The startling relatability to certain elements of the novel increases the fear and impact it has because the reader can begin to deliberate the plausibility of these events if we lived in this darkened version of
society. Another way that societal fears are explored in the novel is through its echoes of history. Orwell himself was fascinated by fascist regimes of Hitler and Stalin. These influences would have been familiar and easily noticed by readers, as aspects of the novel echo elements of their rule – the censorship of history is reminiscent of Stalin rewriting history in his own published book “A Short History of the USSR”. Moreover, the trial of “thought criminals” is similar to the show trials used in communist Russia to create the illusion of justice. In this way, echoing history forces the reader to draw parallels between our past, and this dark, dystopian society the author has created, ultimately making the dystopian world seem not too far out of reach as the events don’t seem as distant as originally thought. what is genre? It is essentially a contract or set of conventions which the writer follows. However, Atkinson’s charm is that she brilliantly and idiosyncratically adapts these conventions. With a deceptively familiar form, When Will There Be Good News treats crime fiction with a fresh complexity. Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is another example of this style of dystopian novel. Her society is based on things that already happened, therefore providing a critique of our own society by holding up a mirror to our flaws but in a more obvious, frightening way. In the novel, America is a theocracy where women are treated as ‘childbearing chattel’; she paints an unsettling society where the role of women is reduced to being purely functional. This is exemplified by the fact that the world ‘sterile’ is outlawed, and men are never responsible for infertility – rather it is always the woman’s fault, and she will be called “unwoman” rather than sterile. By reducing women in this way and stripping away any other aspect of humanity, Atwood extends our own society’s treatment of women in a more drastic way. An illustration of this idea is that the violation of woman is described aby Offred as inevitable and accepted; “… nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for”. Atwood stated that everything that happened in the novel was rooted in reality – for example, the quotas for childbirth were based on “Ceausescu in Romania forcing women to have children”, and the laws that governed her society were founded upon Old Testament biblical laws. By using aspects of history as well as important cultural aspects – such as religion – Atwood’s dystopian society is crafted as being
16
