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
