For being such a zag, dystopias really command a lot of attention. Current crises of faith notwithstanding, Science Fiction exudes optimism as a matter of principle; it loves to show technology and change and improvement. Fantasy? Fantasy is even worse with how it sanitizes the past to make it look romantic. When was the last time you read a medieval high fantasy which didn’t gloss over how terrible feudalism was?
Yet right between these two optimists is the dystopia, a subgenre all about broken things. And no, I don’t think categorizing a dystopia as dehumanizing or fearful like Merriam-Webster gets the point, either.
A dystopia is the speculative genres’ native version of horror that plays to a specific fear: stagnation. The fear in a dystopia is not that the system is broken—all social systems are—but that they are fundamentally unfixable and that the problems will only grow worse. This is why the dystopia is a distinctly modern genre, barely dating back before the early twentieth century. It’s hard to imagine the Greeks or Romans, whose mythology revolved around things constantly deteriorating from the Titans and immortal gods to the human sphere, having a problem with a broken society. “Of course it’s broken and will only get worse,” Homer would say. “That’s just the way things are!”
You hear that, Hunger Games? You’re not really a dystopia. To be a dystopia, the dead end must be final and inescapable. Fixing what’s broken—or at least explicitly showing it being fixed—undermines the whole idea.
The fear that society will reach an insoluble dead end is a uniquely modern one. It only fits our tastes because we culturally assume Moore’s Law, that the GDP will increase year over year, and that we can generally fix our problems as we go. Dystopias reverse this. The fear that history can be forever stuck may not have frightened our ancestors, but it can surely unsettle us.
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