I have a lot of different responses to dystopian and apocalyptic literature… A personal response… a professional response, and I have a few ideas on the larger cultural meanings behind the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.
First, from a personal level… I grew up in the cold war. I participated in duck-and-cover drills in elementary school… movies like Dr. Strangelove, The Day After and Miracle Mile spoke to me on a personal level. I played role playing games like Gamma World and (shout out to fellow old-school-geek Junot Diaz) Aftermath!). And I read stuff like A Canticle for Leibowitz. From this personal connection to the apocalypse, I developed a relationship to the post-apocolpytic genre’s close sibling, Dystopian Literature.
I’m not sure, but I think one of the first “dystopian” stories I ever read was “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellision. It was all down hill from there, as I ingested everything from Huxley to Burgiss to Aldis to Ballard… I could go on and on. But for whatever reason, this type of fiction really spoke to me… and I ate it up. Voraciously. From Literature with a capitol L, to the new wave to cyberpunk, if it was dystopian in nature, I probably read it.
Eventually I ended up doing this Science fiction thing for a living. When John Joseph Adams approached me with an idea about a reprint anthology – Wastelands – my first thought was… “Well, I guess that’s an okay idea… but I already HAVE all those stories. Who exactly is this anthology for?” Then I took off my SF-Grognard hat, and put on my publisher hat and said “It’s for the vast majority of readers out there, who don’t have upwards of three thousand anthologies and single author collections in their personal library.” While wearing this publisher hat, I figured there would be a moderate amount of interest in a post-apocalyptic anthology.
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Regardless of genre, regardless of setting or time period, isn’t every fictional protagonist experiencing dystopia?
Dystopian literature for young adult readers is enjoying a surge in popularity these days – which, in turn, has prompted a veritable flood of newspapers and magazines articles attempting to explain why. Some people argue it’s because today’s teens are inheriting a world plagued by problems of a global scale unknown to previous generations. A taste for dark, dystopian tales, they say, is simply a natural response to growing up amid the great disasters of our age: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Japanese and Haitian earthquakes, the BP oil spill, the melting of the polar ice caps, etcetera, etcetera.
In times of fear and uncertainty, people tend to go one of two ways: Either they retreat to comforting, pleasant distractions…
There’s this short story by Grace Paley where a woman is visiting her father on his deathbed. He has cancer, and he is dying. She’s trying to tell him that not everything is so awful in her life, that there is always hope. To respond to her, he turns up the dial on the machines that are gently aiding him into the dark.
If it feels like our SF is trending toward dystopia, there’s a reason for that: we live in one already. Or rather, any chronicle of the future has to start with where we are in the present, which involves global warming, economic turbulence, peak oil, and all the stuff that’s so likely to feature in the dismal futures that writers are so fond of creating. Perhaps the fact that we’re already in that world is why SF has been losing market share to fantasy….the former no longer offers much in the way of escape.
Dystopian fiction is a time-honored tradition in genre. Beginning with HG Wells and continuing with Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Atwood, and right into the present day with Bacigalupi and Collins, dystopias fascinate and frighten us with what is possible in human society. A well-established subgenre of speculative fiction, they pop up on our bookshelves every few years to bring forth a new set of ‘what if’ questions.
Dystopia is a fine word, concentrated and resonant, for society gone wrong. We like to think that complexity (of politics, economics, technology, religion, demographics) means there are now more ways than ever in which society can go wrong. But that was also the perception in the past – in the the eighteenth century (Swift, Hogarth), the nineteenth (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Zola), and the early twentieth (Fritz Lang, Brecht, Orwell, Kafka, Huxley). Dystopia has always been a literary theme and a philosophical perception, but it didn’t always have such a good label.