Dystopian Novels: What is the appeal?

Dystopian Novels: What is the appeal?

Why do we all enjoy stories that tell us of terrible events and miserable circumstances as we find in so many dystopian novels? Has mankind always been fascinated by doomsday scenarios? We interviewed Dr John Flood from the University of Groningen, expert on dystopian novels, and asked him what drives people to continue reading and writing dystopian fiction. Are we really that morbidly fascinated?

According to Flood, dystopian fiction is not a modern concept. That is to say, the “writing [of] dystopian fiction is a modern concept”, but the genre can be found long before people were calling their novels ‘dystopian’. Great examples of this are Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore, New Atlantis by Bacon and The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, novels that were written in the 16^th and 17^th century. What distinguishes a novel as dystopian is the way we look back and project this genre onto those stories, Flood claims.

We asked Flood whether dystopian literature can be seen as an exaggeration of the flaws in our own society. Flood reasoned that “a good dystopian fiction builds on the idea of possibility”. What this means is that the dystopian world in the novel needs to be likely, otherwise it wouldn’t have the same appeal to the readers. “Dystopian novels are to some degree prophetic. With prophetic I mean ‘warning about the future’”. Furthermore, dystopian stories do not always have to have a cause, like a nuclear disaster, to initiate the collapse in society. Flood goes as far as asking whether “post-disaster novels really are dystopian novels, rather than catastrophe novels. When there has been an ecological disaster or a war of some kind, then the novel only explores the reaction to that catastrophe. Real dystopian novels on the other hand explore what happens when somebody sets up a perfect society that turns out to be dystopian.”

But what attracts us to read these novels of impending doom and hopeless futures? Flood: “Dystopian novels might give the reader a sense of superiority. There is a reassuring aspect to this; the reader can stand back and say, I would not have made this choice, I would not have let this situation get so out of hand.”

What also makes dystopian fiction strangely irresistible is the paranoia that gets fed by the novels. Just think about the recent 337% rise in sales of Orwell’s 1984 because of Edward Snowden and America’s privacy-hacking scandal. “Anything that sells paranoia always sells as well, that’s a given” Flood agrees. “1984 sells because it’s a particular kind of dystopia, one about surveillance; it feeds into people’s paranoia.”

So where are we headed then? Is it possible that dystopian fiction might become dystopian fact if we’re not careful? Flood: “More interesting dystopias are not when the plague breaks out in a city, which causes part of society to collapse. It’s when we gradually let our society lapse into a dystopia by agreeing to tiny little parts of it and suddenly realizing ‘oh my god, it’s too late now, we should have stopped that sooner. Now it’s out of our control’. And electronic surveillance will be one of those categories, I think.” Until that time we will have to satiate our fascination with dystopian worlds by reading novels which, to be fair, is a lot more satisfying than living in one.

Sources:

Flood, John. Personal interview. 2 Oct. 2013.

Dystopian Literature: What makes it Dystopian?

The question is: what makes a book dystopian? The answer seems simple; a terrible world, often with electronic surveillance. However, it is not so simple. There is much more to a dystopian story than just that: not every dystopian piece of writing needs to have electronic surveillance as a theme and a terrible world is a broad term. In order to discover what truly makes a dystopian novel dystopian, Dr John Flood, who lectures at the University of Groningen and is an expert on dystopian literature, has been kind enough to shed some light on this difficult topic.

Most dystopian fiction starts with a disaster of some sort that catapults the society into a dystopia. However, is this necessary? According to Dr Flood, it is not: ‘You do get that kind of dystopian fiction, but other dystopian fiction involves gradual social shifts in a particular direction and normally in one that is thought of to be is positive initially.’  Furthermore: ‘I actually wonder if  post disaster novels are properly said to be dystopian novels rather than catastrophe novels. In a sense what you are doing is you are following the logic of what would happen after this disaster rather than following what happens when somebody goes about setting up a perfect society that goes very badly wrong.’ According to Dr Flood, then, disastrous occurrences are far from required.

In fact, dystopian novels are far more effective when the dystopian society is brought on by a social slide because then the reader can truly see the dystopia for what it is: an ineffective attempt at creating a utopian society. This makes a dystopian novel far more harrowing, for if a particular dystopia is not achieved by a disastrous event, it is achieved by human choice. For example, the ideals of normal people that are corrupted over time and that is something that can happen to anyone.

Another thing that makes dystopian novels truly dystopian is that they are likely to happen. As Dr Flood puts it: ‘All dystopian fiction, good dystopian fiction, works of the ‘we might do that’. If it’s not very likely I really don’t think it’s dystopian. A dystopian fiction has to be possible and likely, otherwise it’s just a bad world, a bad place to be.’ There is, then, a difference between a bad world and a dystopian world. A bad world is obviously terrible, but not very likely and a dystopian world is equally terrible, but very likely.

This is what makes a dystopian novel effective: the idea that this world could be real. If it is so likely, what is to say that it might not one day come true. It may becomes our reality. The success of the dystopian novel lies in the fact that it is not at all farfetched. The idea of, for example, a surveillance state sounds all too familiar to us when considering things such as phone hacking, etc.

Another element of a dystopian novel is that it is in a way prophetic. To be specific, it warns us about what might happen if we make the same choices as the characters in the novels do. As Dr Flood says: ‘What prophets do in the Old Testament is they warn about the future: they say if you continue on doing what you’re doing this will happen and it won’t be nice.’ Indeed, many dystopian novels contain this element. For example, 1984, written by George Orwell, is about a surveillance society which could very likely become our future. These prophetic warnings are so effective in making people think about their own society because they are based in reality. If it is very likely that something might happen, the warning becomes all the more serious.

In short, what truly makes a dystopian novel dystopian, then, is that a dystopian society is not necessarily brought on by a disastrous occurrence, often it is not and that they are very likely to actually take place. In fact, they are almost too close for comfort. Luckily, though, because dystopian literature is so likely, it is just as likely to be avoided. The characters in the novel had a choice to allow society to turn into a dystopia and so do real people in the real world.

Works Cited.

Flood, John. Personal interview. 2 October 2013.

The History of Dystopian Literature

Books such as Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games have sparked much interest in dystopian fiction recently. We read more dystopian books all the time, and many of these books feature a flawed society that is at least in part corrupted by technology. The well-known 1984 by George Orwell produced the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’ to indicate a constant surveillance, and the Hunger Games involves a television program that monitors contestants as they try to kill each other. However, dystopian fiction cannot always have been based on technology: televisions and computers are recent developments. Therefore it is easy to wonder when dystopias first began appearing in literature, and how the treatment of the theme has evolved over the years. Dr John Flood, lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit  Groningen and expert on the subject of literature, has kindly taken the time to answer some of our questions regarding the history of dystopian fiction.

First off, Dr Flood explains that the theme has been around for a long time. “A person does not have to be writing something he or she thinks of as dystopian fiction for it to have been dystopian fiction,” Dr Flood says. Dystopian fiction may not have existed as a genre several hundreds of years ago, but that does not mean that there aren’t any books from that time featuring dystopian themes. When we look at these books from a modern viewpoint, it is possible to find some very early examples of dystopian fiction. Dr Flood mentions the book Utopia written by Thomas More in 1516, which, despite its title, quite definitely reflects a dystopian society. “Although it’s presented as an ideal world, we know that More can’t have seen it that way.” So even when trying to describe a utopia, writers may actually end up portraying a society that is flawed or dysfunctional.

Dystopian fiction has therefore existed for hundreds of years, but it is not yet clear how the genre evolved during that time. Dr Flood says: “There is something, I think, identifiably characteristic of twentieth century utopias (…) and that is that there is a tie-in to technology of some sorts of another.” Although utopian authors in the past wrote about societies that worked very well, they did not imagine that it would one day be possible for machines to do their work. In modern dystopian fiction these machines are often the cause of problems. The focus on technology only came about recently, and forms a stark contrast to the earlier dystopian fiction. Yet even so Dr Flood mentions that technological dystopian fiction goes back further than we usually think. As early as 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a book called We that inspired much of Orwell’s technologically orientated 1984. However, it is clear that there is a large rift between earlier and more recent dystopian fiction that is caused by technological advancements.

The history of dystopian fiction is not as simple as it seems. This is partly because dystopian fiction has existed for quite a while longer than most people think. It is by no means a modern hype; our forefathers were also intrigued by the idea of a crumbling society. A further complication in the history of dystopian fiction is that the focus of the stories has shifted to a society ruined by technology rather than by human doing. As such, it is safe to conclude that the evolution of dystopian fiction follows a crooked path, but it is a path of which every curve is interesting and worth exploring.