DYSTOPIAN WORLD

“Utopian thinking: the capacity to imagine a future that departs significantly from what
we know to be a general-condition in the present. ... In the peculiar form of dystopias, utopian
thinking may alert us to certain tendencies in the present, which, if allowed to continue
unchecked and carried to a logical extreme would result in a world we would find abhorrent.” 1
As we have mentioned in the first chapter, the term “utopia” was coined around 1516 by
Thomas More, and it literally meant “no place”. The term dystopia is mentioned as first
appearing in 1747, when it was invented “by Henry Lewis Younge in his Utopia or Apollo’s
Golden Days, spelled as “dustopia” used as a precise negative contrast to utopia.”2 While Utopia
was used to describe an ideal world, an island where everything was perfect, a negative Utopia or
“dystopia” offered a gloomy, often poignant vision of the future, providing a picture of the
present which was dropped in the future, often in a skit-like manner, painted in dark colours. In
spite of the visible differences between the two genres, the technique shows important
similarities: the device of displacement being used by both genres.
There are two methods of displacement. The first one consists in reflecting the present as
an imaginary future, a non-existing time, while the second one consists in limiting the present in
space, in a non-existing place, an island, for example. This method of displacement provides the
reader a deforming mirror which can either place beauty in the foreground, as in the case of
positive utopia, or it can enlarge anything that is ugly in the present reality, which is the case of
negative utopia or dystopia. Both of them, the positive and negative utopias are absolutely
critical because their starting point is that the present is imperfect and it needs to be completely
changed, or if the present remains unchanged we can expect for extreme consequences such as in
dystopias, where people regard the future of their society in a gloomy manner, considering that
“as the ecosystem gradually unravels, city dwellers feel the effects in diffuse ways. Food prices
rise until many people cannot afford enough to eat. Poor refugees appear at the edges of the city
looking for a way to survive. Diseases seem to crop up from nowhere and spread rapidly. Riots

1
John Friedmann “The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research”, 2000, 24: 460-72.
2
Lyman Tower Sargent, citing Deirdre Ni Chuanacháin, “Re: dystopia.” Email to the author, 15 July 2009. Sargent
alludes to this early use in his Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 4;
http://www.novelguide.com/Utopia/essayquestions.html
explode out of hunger and desperation. A frightened population turns to the government to
enforce order by any means necessary.”3
A lawless and unwanted society, referring to a depressing future in which things become
worse and which shows images of more unpleasant worlds may be called a dystopian society.
The residents of such a world have a dehumanized and dreadful life while they strive for
survival. The border between friendship and enmity is so subtle and hazy, that anyone or
anything might represent a menace. It is a collapse of the social order and it is related to our
present-day society. Religion is usually absent in such worlds where people tend to replace God
with the government which controls every movement of the citizens. Regarding the economy of
such a community, they do not have too much freedom of choice and are not given any career
options. What will do the main character from dystopian fiction is to ultimately realize that
something is wrong with the community he lives in and will break the rules or the law. Human
beings have been created spontaneous, unforeseeable and free, a fact which endows them with
unceasing abilities. In contradiction with the machines, people must have freedom to move, to
speak and to express feelings and ideas. Any trial of mechanizing persons causes the emergence
of a dehumanized world, eliminating all the human traits.
20th century’s social and political scene made some writers like George Orwell or
Anthony Burgess to formulate their fears about the dark future of humanity. The latter described
such a society on the boundary of damnation, with a discouraged hero who is at the mercy of the
authorities’ control. This protagonist is deprived of free will and choice, and has to obey and live
in this destructive society. Dystopian literature refers especially to the decay of people reflected
in acts of violence, sexual immorality and use of drugs. The characters live only in the present
and chose to have a sinful life. The basic characteristic of the above-mentioned society is that the
authorities caused an “overall paralysis of any aesthetic sense…everything is machine made,
mass-produced, and sterile, and as a consequence, civilization has lost touch with the qualities
that once gave life zest, qualities of passion and vitality, of irrationality and excess that were
both its peril and its promise.”4 It is a system which destroys human individualism, controls the
information received by people, pretending that slavery represents freedom. Even if someone

3
Hill, Steven. “What We’re Afraid Of.” San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, http://www-
scf.usc.edu/~morihisa/essay1.htm
4
Whissen, T. R. Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature, New York: Greenwood Press,
1992; http://www-scf.usc.edu/~morihisa/essay1.htm
might think that psychological control establishes the order in a society, major drawbacks and
repercussions happen.
Dystopian fiction is a kind of narrative prose. Its language was characterised in a series of
specific ways, between 1920 and 1960. These types of texts were complicated, and responded
directly to, a complicated and difficult web of material historical conditions, intellectual and
cultural currents and dramatic social transformation. From the period after the First World War
to the close of the post-war era, political structures were questioned, inverted and re-thought; the
modern nation-state widened and developed in an unprecedentedly immediate style. During this
period there were works written by authors who were born into stiffly stratified societies around
the turn of the twentieth century. During the period of their writing careers they have witnessed
total war, revolutions, the Great Depression and amazing advances in science including the
discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the development of atomic bombs.
Dystopian fiction absorbed a variety of experimental techniques from literary modernism,
using them in a genre that held authentic popular appeal. These writings are meaningful not only
as documents in cultural and intellectual history, but also within literary studies as an example of
a genre dealing with the plurality of literary modernisms that question and place themselves
within cultures considered as non-elite or popular.
This type of dystopian fiction began in the midst of things, with the story being
concentrated on the development, self-consciousness and knowledge of a character-individual or
a small group of individuals who begin to revolt against dominant states. These were novels of
ideas written in forms of critique in which satire had an important role. Therefore, dystopian
fiction progressed from a post-Enlightenment tradition that evolved through the Victorian era
into the work of writers like H. G. Wells. Dystopian authors were critical of the conditions and
assumptions of the post-Enlightenment tradition from which they derived. An important aspect
of dystopian literature was its reaction against distinctive tendencies in the history of literary
utopias, especially as found in Wells’s works. Dystopian criticism of literary utopias does not
imply that it is orientated towards anti-utopian thought. It actually describes dystopian fiction as
being “largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century.”5
Dystopian fiction can tell us much about the changing nature and worth of social
awarness. However, such fiction does not present social experience as a static, neatly

5
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia , Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000, xi.
conceptualised whole, but as a process, an evolving part of present, a lived experience or a
“structure of feeling” which could be defined as “specifically affective elements of consciousness
and relationships - not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought -
practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity… a social
experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be
private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its
emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies.”6
‘Dystopia’ is a word with developing cultural spread. It has recently been used almost
interchangeably with ‘Orwellian’ in public and media debate as an indicator of a dreadful future.
This interchangeability is significant, and what is also interesting to note the changes in use here.
The word “dystopians” was used for the first time in the 1860s by J.S. Mill as a critical and
satirical device. After a very long period of time of infrequent use, it started to be used to refer to
a literary genre. ‘Dystopia’ has recently begun to be used as a term referring to any set of
conditions considerably worse than they have been either in the past or are in the present time, in
fiction or in empirical reality.7 It often seems that the word ‘dystopia’ is chosen to express
conditions that appear fictional because they are “too bad to be practicable” and are entering
empirical reality.

6
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford UP, 1977, 132 ; http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/Williams.htm
7
Simon Hoggart, Britain Goes From Dystopia to Arcadia in Six Months, Simon Hoggart’s Sketch. Guardian 30
November 2010. Online ed. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/30/simon-hoggarts-sketch-
georgeosborne? INTCMP=SRCH>