Dystopia / Dystopian Novel

Dystopia

         

        The word derives from Ancient Greek for "bad place". It can alternatively be called cacotopia or anti-utopia. A dystopia is a community or society, usually fictional that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many works of fiction, particularly in stories set in a speculative future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Dystopian novels usually include elements of contemporary society and are seen as a warning against some modern trends.

          A dystopia is usually set at some point in the author’s future and describes a society in which we would not want to live. Writers, presenting dystopias, generally want to alert readers to the potential pitfalls and dangers of society’s present course or of a course society must conceivably take one day. In the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin people are permitted to live out of public view twice a week for one hour. They are only referred to by numbers instead of names, but are "ciphers" which are neither. Unlike utopian fiction, which often features an outsider to have the world shown to him/her, dystopias seldom feature an outsider as the protagonist. The story usually centers on a protagonist who questions the society, often feeling intuitively that something is terribly wrong. The hero comes to believe that escape or even overturning the social order is possible and decides to act at the risk of their own life; this may appear as irrational even to him/her, but they still act. Another popular archetype of hero in the more modern dystopian literature is the Vonnegut hero, a hero who is in high-standing within the social system, but sees how wrong everything is, and attempts to either change the system or bring it down

         

There is usually a group of people somewhere in the society who are not under the complete control of the state, and in whom the hero of the novel usually puts their hope, although often he or she still fails to change anything. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four they are the "proles”, in Huxley's Brave New World they are the people on the reservation, and in We by Zamyatin they are the people outside the walls of the One State. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, they are the "book people" past the river and outside the city.

         

Examples of Dystopian Novels

Famous depiction of dystopian societies includes,

·       We (1920) Yevgeny Zamyatin

·       Nineteen Eighty Four (1948) George Orwell

·       Brave New World (1932) Aldous Huxley

·       The Hunger Games (2008) Suzanne Collins

·       The Time Machine (1895) H.G Wells

·       A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess

·       Fahrenheit 451(1953) Ray Bradbury

The film such as Demolition Man and Equilibrium etc. portrays dystopian societies.