What is dystopian fiction?

But what is it?

Dystopian fiction is hot-hot-hot right now in YA lit. I write dystopian fiction. A lot of people are interested in dystopian fiction. But what is it? How do you write it and what does it all mean? Is it important, is it worth reading, and is it for me?

Well come on in and pull up a chair and let’s have ourselves a really exciting conversation about a very depressing subject and see where it takes us. So, let’s try this again:

Dystopia: –noun

a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Meh-eh…not exactly. I mean, sure, yes, it could be a thing characterized by human misery, squalor, oppression, disease and overcrowding, but that is usually a symptom, not the disease. Talking about dystopian fiction means we need a better definition than that. Okay Marriam-Webster, don’t let me down now.

Dystopia: –n

an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be

That’s better. And sometimes being as bad as it can be also means that there is squalor, oppression, disease and overcrowding. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Nothing to Fear but Nuclear Warheads and Androids

Dystopia magic comes from fear. Fear of the “What if?” The thing about dystopia is that it is very possible, and in many ways, very probable. We fear running out of oil. We fear widespread famine. We fear government tyranny. Dystopian fiction answers the “What if?” question, but takes it to horrific extremes. It takes the answer to the ends of the as-bad-as-it-can-get rating scale and them pushes it over the edge.

Which came first, the good times or the bad times?

Here’s something else that is good to know: Utopian fiction came first.

I’m sure everyone has seen the movie The Matrix, right? You know when Neo learns that the humans were given a utopia to live in, but rejected it? That’s because there’s some human flaw in our make-up that rejects the idea of utopia because we cannot accept a world where we are forced to give up free will, creativity, and spirituality.

I mean, it’s no big surprise that so many conflicts arise between cultures that promote free will and those that do not.

And the unfortunate thing about utopia is that in order to achieve it, we must give up free will to a governing body that tells us how to act, who to be, what to like, and what opinions to have. We have to be happy to give up this control because if there is room for disagreement, there will be conflict. One only has to look at the American political temperature to know that. This can be as big as Health Care Reform or as small as one person not liking the smell of cooked fish so no public place should be able to cook fish. It can be as big as same sex marriage or as small as whether your neighbor should get to paint their door bright pink. So writers who were like, “No free will? No personal choice? That is not a good world.”And so wrote their responses in the “negative utopian” genre. (It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that the term dystopia emerged.)

The Dystopia CNN Game You Can Play at Home

Ok, ok, here let’s do an exercise.

1. Open up CNN.com. Go on. Open it up. I’ll wait.
2. Ready? At the bottom of the front page are a bunch of sections with a bunch of headlines categorized underneath. Pull the WORST sounding headline from each section. Or if there isn’t much in the way of “worst” (as in Sports or Living) pull the one that feels like it has the most potential to lead to the WORST sort of story. Here’s mine:

• U.S.: Well blowout ‘rains oil’ over Louisiana.
• World: Russia loses quarter of grain harvest
• Business: Foreclosures rise in July
• Politics: Rangel: ‘I am not going away.’
• Entertainment: Duggars: Open to having a 20th
• Health: Medical tourists bring home superbug
• Tech: Facebook location tool close?
• Living: Can’t afford trip to hubby’s burial
• Justice: Engineer guilty of giving info to China
• Sports: Yet another medical issue for Lefty
• Blogs: TIE: iReport: Moscow blanketed in smoke and Belief: NY Islamic center won’t move
• Afghanistan: TIE: UN: Taliban killing more women, kids AND Why were aid workers targeted?

Ok, wow, these are some pretty terrible headlines to read. This is just one day, at one moment in time, off one major news website. OnYahoo I read about thousands dead in China landslides that are burying ENTIRE TOWNS, the superbug mentioned in the Health section of CNN, and the fires in Russia are moving into the Chernobyl site sending radiation dust into the atmosphere.

Need some story ideas? Almost all of the headlines above can be written into a dystopian novel. All you have to do is ask the question, “What if?” and make sure your answer is as terrifying and horrible as you can make it.

1. The well blowout in Louisiana comes hot on the heels of the explosion in the gulf involving BP and a lot of oil floating around in the ocean. Is this a sign of things to come? Is there something wrong with the world’s oil that are leaving it so combustible? Is there a conspiracy? Have you ever read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series?
2. Russia is on fire. I mean that literally: it is on fire. The fact that it has lost a quarter of its grain harvest is pretty substantial. I have no idea if they export their grain or not, but if they do then anyone who regularly buys grain from them probably won’t be getting any. What if: As country burns, famine kills millions over the winter. Or how about that the fires have moved into the Chernobyl area and are kicking up radioactive dust? Sure, scientists are saying the radiation is probably small, but you could follow that the inhaled particles kick off a genetic chain reaction that causes the zombie apocalypse. Or: Radioactive dust mutates the citizens and now marriages and breeding have become government regulated and love has nothing to do with it anymore.
3. What kind of information did the engineer give to China?
4. Due to the health care reform regulations on hospitals and an American economic recession, people flock overseas to have plastic surgery done which spreads a superbug across the globe that had before been kept quiet in small pockets of India and Pakistan. What if: The superbug is immune to all known antibiotics and wipes out half the world’s population. People become xenophobic, and interpersonal relationships end. The face of our social culture disappears over night.
5. Facebook is in control of as much personal information as we give them. Their location tool now lets people use their mobile devices to show their location to others. Their exact location. Down to the building you are in on the street in which you live. What if Facebook’s control on people’s personal information became so absolute that they became the next super-power and that regional governments become purely figureheads beneath the political control of their Facebook masters?

So dystopian fiction is interesting because it exists so close to our own world, but why do we like it so much? I mean, who wants to fantasize and live in an alternate, terrible reality that is just a little too close to reality for comfort?

Tomorrow I’ll talk about why we enjoy this brand of storytelling so much. Stay tuned and tell me what you think about dystopian fiction down in the comments! Which are your favorite books?