Splitting a Sci-Fi Subgenre - the Old Utopia/Dystopia vs the New Straight Dystopia

I hang out a lot on the internet, on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as places like Figment.com, and I've noticed there's a lot of confusion about different emerging genres. For example, what's the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal? Or the difference between space opera and science fiction? What defines steampunk? So I decided to write a few blogs about those different things. This one is focusing on a not-so-recent split in a sub-genre of science fiction that I actually studied for two semesters in high school: Utopia/Dystopia.

In olden days—aka, before The Hunger Games came out, which caused a change in how such literature was written—you couldn't have a dystopia novel without the concept of utopia. For those who don't know, a utopia is a perfect world where there is no crime, no unhappiness, no darkness, nothing. Everything's great. Fantastic. Perfect.

Of course, everybody knows that old phrase, "You can't please everyone." Same applies here. You can't have a real utopia in a world run by normal humans. Or even robots, actually, if you look at the film I-Robot with Will Smith. A utopia, by its very definition, can't exist without squishing somebody's happiness. And therefore you get the dystopia aspect—the part of the utopian society where all the crud and bad stuff pops up.

1)    In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, it was the destruction of basically anything that made you think too hard and thus question the rights and regulations of the government—namely, books. Except there are people who still like reading. Thus the conflict of the novel.

2)    In the film Soilent Green, they solve world hunger. Cool, right? Except they do it by resorting to a form of cannibalism ("Soilent Green is PEOPLE!") and it's this big government conspiracy involving murder and such.

3)    There's an episode in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation about a planet whose culture has almost zero crime and everyone is so happy all the time. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? But how do they manage this? Because any infraction, no matter how small, is a capital crime. You die for walking on the grass if there's a "Keep Off" sign. That's crazy, right?

4)    A short story called "The Lottery" tells of a town without crime of any sort because the town gets out all their aggression, all their evil feelings, by stoning a town-member to death once a year, chosen at random via lottery.

5)    In Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, the peaceful, productive culture of the main character is preserved by the destruction of the human ego—the destruction of the concept I AM in the human psyche. Does it work? Of course not. Thus the conflict in the story.

In all these books and movies, we have the concept of utopia ("everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo, it's for our own good") paired with the actuality of the dystopian world ("pretend everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo or something terrible happens to you, just keep smiling and pretend it's for our own good"). But the publication of The Hunger Games changed this genre forever.

How?

By stripping away the concept of utopia from the utopia/dystopia subgenre.

I won't say it was for the first time (I haven’t read everything, believe it or not, lol), but for the first time on a nationally bestselling scale, the idea of "Big Brother is watching you for your own good" was ripped out of the utopia/dystopia novel, leaving only the aggressive resentment of "screw off, Big Brother; stop being a creeper."

In THG, for the first time, the reader sees a totalitarian government viewed for the sucky, civil-rights-smashing fist of tyranny that it is. This revolutionized the utopia/dystopia subgenre, creating a completely different genre of novels: the straight-up dystopias, books about worlds with unfair rules that people either view as necessary evils to combat even greater evils or actually acknowledge as sucking and try (or have tried) to do something about them—even if it's only to get out and get away as soon as possible.

Some of the best versions of this that I've read so far are the following:

The Chemical Garden Trilogy—Lauren Destefano

The Divergent Trilogy—Veronica Roth
The Hunger Games Trilogy—Suzanne Collins
The Iron Codex Trilogy—Caitlin Kittredge
The Lunar Chronicles—Marissa Meyer
The Razorland Trilogy—Ann Aguire **
The Red Death Duology—Bethany Griffin
The Selection Trilogy—Kaitlin Cass
 
** The Razorland Trilogy is actually a terrible series, badly written and completely implausible based on human physiology, BUT! It's a perfect example of a dystopian novel where the government sucks but is considered a necessary evil, so I included it in this list.

Basically, the publication of The Hunger Games gave rise to a sci-fi subgenre of novels where the main character(s) faced a corrupt government or ruling class or system that everyone (or mostly everyone) actually acknowledged was in fact corrupted. Generally this government came into power after some sort of apocalyptic something or other:

1)    The Chemical Garden Trilogy—a series of natural disasters and the outbreak of a genetically transmitted virus (incurable as of book 1) that killed about 50% of the world's population when males hit 25 and women hit 20 and is slowly eradicating everyone else as those birthdays approach. In this series, the government isn't the problem. It's the father-in-law of the MC; he's basically lord of the manor, as it were, and she's stuck under his power unless she escapes. This ruling class (subject to the government, but with more power than everyone else) is the corrupt group.

2)    The Divergent Trilogy—the outbreak of a huge war (though this governing system put into place afterward, while somewhat corrupt, is not totalitarian, and has only been in power for perhaps three or four generations; the corruption doesn’t begin to truly manifest until a couple years before the events of the first book)

3)    The Hunger Games Trilogy—a series of massive, catastrophic natural disasters crushing the American population to about 500,000 people (if that) set up the establishment of the current government about 150 years before the start of the trilogy; a war 74 years before the book's beginning started to take out said government, only to be quelled by the complete nuclear eradication of 1 of the 13 rebel districts (among other measures).

4)    The Iron Codex Trilogy—an alternate-history of the 1940/50s during the Red Scare, so no natural disasters, but with the appearance of strange preternatural creatures that actively hunt humans about 50-100 years prior to give the humans an "enemy" to fear, similar to what the Nazis did with the Jews; also set against the backdrop of a much more intense Cold War without the historical influence of World War II.

5)    The Lunar Chronicles—set in a country that kind of sucks regarding civil rights anyway (China, part of what's called the Eastern Empire after World War III; yes, that's WW3) and during a long-lasting outbreak of an incurable but highly contagious plague known as letumosis (thus giving the government the right to shut stuff down, arrest people, etc. if evidence of this disease is found). You actually see the difference between the Eastern Empire and France in book 2; the dystopian part is only in book 1 so far, and only for the main character, a cyborg (considered less than human in that country). Also set during the very tentative cease-fire between Earth and a technologically advanced alien race that wants to wipe us out for being an inferior species, so we've got the us/them mentality in use as well.

6)    The Razorland Trilogy—zombie plague and chemical/nuclear warfare about 60 years ago drove everyone underground (as far as the MC knows) into enclaves run by small councils.

7)    The Red Death Duology—war, natural disasters, and terrible incurable plagues created by chemical warfare maybe 20-30 years prior to the start of the novel; in this one, the government isn't so much the problem as a single (insane) person running the government in a principality set somewhere in Europe or the Mediterranean (they don't tell you which; only that there are crocs in the water, but they might've been imported by the psycho). Things really go to Hades in book 1 when the leader of the rebels decides to infect everyone with the Red Death (yep, from the Poe story) as a means of waging war on the city and its psychotic prince.

After the apocalyptic something or other, the government may start out nice, but then turns evil or malevolent in various ways, slowly, stealing the rights and livelihood of the people over time by corrupting those who can be corrupted and killing those who can't. That's a big background plot device in The Red Death Duology, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Iron Codex. And unlike in the old utopian/dystopian  novels, people actually notice. How they handle it may vary, and such discussions are for other blog posts, not this one.

A quick aside: I left out a few series that might seem to fall under this category—The Matched Trilogy by Ally Condie, for example, or The Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver. The reason I left these out is because to explain how they fit the parameters would be an entire blog in and of itself. I'll get to it at some point, though, I promise. I've already reviewed Lauren Oliver's Delirium, but I intend to write an essay/blog about it at some point as well. I also plan on doing a four-part essay on apathy, blame, fear, and hope as used by dystopian governments in novels as effective coercion tools, here.

So, to sum up: in order to have a dystopian novel (whether utopian/dystopian or straight up dystopian), tyrannical governments/rulers/ruling forces must be present. For it to be a dystopian novel without the concept of utopia, the masses can't buy into the dictatorial lies.

Now everybody go read The Iron Codex. It's awesome!

LA Knight