Utopian and dystopian fiction


Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of speculative fiction that explore extreme forms of social and political structures. A utopia is a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. A dystopia offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels depict both types of society to more directly contrast their properties. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Utopian literature is of two basic types. Some describe imagined societies of the future to be desired or simply predicted. Others propose immediate practical action by envisioning the founding of new communities of an "ideal" character. These might be said to describe community projects and their sentiment overlaps with those of the garden city or New Towns movements.
More than 400 utopian works in the English language were published prior to the year 1900, with more than a thousand others appearing during the 20th century. This increase is partially associated with the rise in popularity of science fiction and young adult fiction more generally, but also larger scale social change that brought awareness of larger societal or global issues, such as technology, climate change, and growing human population. Some of these trends have created distinct subgenres such as climate fiction, young adult dystopian novels, and feminist dystopian novels.

Utopian fiction in general

Utopian Literature sets itself aside as a literature form of utopian thought and desire. Its characteristics can be described as the thought of a better or ideal society compared to current society, these ideas being formed into a literary medium, the overall concept of utopian ideas encourages the reader to act towards bettering their current society or moves them to understand and recognize current issues critically, and that utopian thought emerges from the desire for a better life and society.
The word utopia was first used in direct context by Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word
utopia resembles both the Greek words outopos, and eutopos.

Examples

Thomas More's 1516 book Utopia, written in Latin, sets out a vision of an ideal society. As the title suggests, the work presents an ambiguous and ironic projection of the ideal state. The whimsical nature of the text can be confirmed by the narrator of Utopia's second book, Raphael Hythloday. The Greek root of the name "Hythloday" suggests an 'expert in nonsense.' Thomas More's idea of a utopia stems from contemporary economic and societal issues in Tudor England. More directly confronts the issues of rising population, oppressive landlords, and civilians turning to crime through Hythloday's perspective in Book I of his novel.
An earlier example of a Utopian work from classical antiquity is Plato's Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system. Later, Tommaso Campanella was influenced by Plato's work and wrote The City of the Sun, which describes a modern utopian society built on equality. Other examples include Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and Samuel Butler's Erewhon, which uses an anagram of "nowhere" as its title. This, like much of utopian literature, can be seen as satire; Butler inverts illness and crime, with punishment for the former and treatment for the latter.
One example of the utopian genre's meaning and purpose is described in Fredric Jameson's Archeologies of the Future '', which addresses many utopian varieties defined by their program or impulse. He describes the fundamental dynamic of utopias lying in "identity and difference." Jameson states that the core of utopian thought and politics lies in an imagined system that is thoroughly different from an original, real one.
Another early work of utopian but satirical fiction would be the English philosopher and writer Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. This is an early example of what would later be called science fiction writing. There is debate about to what degree Cavendish's work can be called feminist. For example, Rachel Trubowitz describes A Blazing World'' as a feminist utopia due to how much it challenges traditional gender roles; however, Sujata Iyengar says that Cavendish’s work reinforces ideas of racial and feminine inferiority. Vanessa Rapatz focuses more on Cavendish's subsequent impact and argues that her writings provide a context for understanding contemporary feminist authors such as Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler. Because Cavendish often broke the boundaries of conventional female writing and behavior, many people have been dismissive of her utopian vision. Samuel Pepys described Cavendish as being a “mad, conceited” and “ridiculous woman”. Virginia Woolf wrote that her work lacked discipline and “her ideas poured out higgledy-piggledy in torrents of prose, poetry, and philosophy.”

Dystopian fiction

A dystopia is a society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, such as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression. Most authors of dystopian fiction explore at least one reason why things are that way, often as an analogy for similar issues in the real world. Dystopian literature serves to "provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable".
Some dystopias claim to be utopias. Samuel Butler's Erewhon can be seen as a dystopia because of the way sick people are punished as criminals while thieves are "cured" in hospitals, which the inhabitants of Erewhon see as natural and right, i.e., utopian.
Dystopias usually extrapolate elements of contemporary society, and thus can be read as political warnings.
Eschatological literature is a form of literature that can go hand-in-hand with dystopian literature. This is a form of literature that specifically focuses on some form of apocalypse, such as the collapse of a society, the end of an era of human history, or the end of the world itself.

Examples

The 1921 novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin portrays a post-apocalyptic future in which society is entirely based on logic and modeled after mechanical systems. George Orwell was influenced by We when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel about Oceania, a state at perpetual war, its population controlled through propaganda. Big Brother and the daily Two Minutes Hate set the tone for an all-pervasive self-censorship. Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World started as a parody of utopian fiction, and projected into the year 2540 industrial and social changes he perceived in 1931, leading to industrial success by a coercively persuaded population divided into five castes. Karin Boye's 1940 novel Kallocain is set in a totalitarian world state where a drug is used to control the individual's thoughts.
Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange is set in a future England that has a subculture of extreme youth violence, and details the protagonist's experiences with the state intent on changing his character at its whim. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale describes a future United States governed by a totalitarian theocracy, where women have no rights, and Stephen King's The Long Walk describes a similar totalitarian scenario, but depicting the participation of teenage boys in a deadly contest. Examples of young-adult dystopian fiction include The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz, The Maze Runner series by James Dashner, and the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. Video games often include dystopias as well; notable examples include the Fallout series, BioShock, and the later games of the Half-Life series, along with other games such as ARC Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Wolfenstein series.

History of dystopian fiction

The history of dystopian literature can be traced back to the reaction to the French Revolution of 1789 and the prospect that mob rule would produce dictatorship. Until the late 20th century, it was usually anti-collectivist. Dystopian fiction emerged as a response to the utopian. Its early history is traced in Gregory Claeys' Dystopia: A Natural History.
The beginning of technological dystopian fiction can be traced back to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops". M Keith Booker states that "The Machine Stops," We and Brave New World are "the great defining texts of the genre of dystopian fiction, both in vividness of their engagement with real-world social and political issues and in the scope of their critique of the societies on which they focus."
Another important figure in dystopian literature is H. G. Wells, whose work The Time Machine is also widely seen as a prototype of dystopian literature. Wells' work draws on the social structure of the 19th century, providing a critique of the British class structure at the time. Post World War II, even more dystopian fiction was produced. These works of fiction were interwoven with political commentary: the end of World War II brought about fears of an impending Third World War and a consequent apocalypse.
Modern dystopian fiction draws not only on topics such as totalitarian governments and anarchism, but also pollution, global warming, climate change, health, the economy and technology. Modern dystopian themes are common in the young adult genre of literature.

Subgenres