Dystopian fiction: the start of a Brave New World by Lorna

Dystopian fiction.  The terrifying vision; the ‘what if…’ It just never stops, does it?  At school or college it all seems terribly grown up and political: the alternative caste system in ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley, or the terrifying original ‘Big Brother’ scenario, in George Orwell’s '1984', where the Government controls even our thoughts.  ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess, is possibly one of the most alarming things I’ve ever read, and Margaret Atwood’s ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ should probably be read by every woman before she turns twenty, especially if the history of The Suffragettes hasn’t decided you as a feminist: try the future instead.  ‘Wool’ by Hugh Howey seems to have an environmental message and then turns out to be a warning against controlling and misleading governments.  I even went to see a dystopian ‘Macbeth’ in London’s ‘Trafalgar Studios’ set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland, which managed to make an environmental point.  Yes, historically, dystopian writing was rather heavy going, laden with messages and warnings for us to heed. The left wingers warned us against self interest, tyranny and greed; the right wingers wanted us to worry about suppression of creativity and enterprise. It was doom and gloom for the grown up and politically engaged.

But now something quite different is going on. Dystopian fiction seems to have been claimed by the young. It has become a youthful genre. It might have started with ‘The Hunger Games’ in 2008, when Suzanne Collins combined our thirst for outrageous reality TV with a world where young people were thrown into an arena in a fight to the death. ‘Gone’ by Michael Grant was published the same year, though, offering us another world without adults: they literally vanish. (‘Lord of the Flies’, anyone?) In the same year, ‘The Declaration’ by Gemma Malley, offers a scenario where no one ever dies, thereby creating a world where unwanted children are raised together as servants to the elderly, selfish adults, who refuse to die and make way for them. So 2008 seems to be the year it all started and in 2011 we got ‘Divergent’, in which the heroine chooses a ‘faction’ where it is unusual for adults to survive into old age. The most recent big offering is a British one: ‘The Bone Season’ by Samantha Shannon, cleverly combining the popular supernatural, fantasy elements of ‘Twilight’ and ‘The Mortal Instruments’ with an eerie dystopian ‘other’ world.

What do these dark, brooding futuristic worlds have to offer the young of the modern world? Why so beloved, all of a sudden, since 2008? Well, for a start, we can look at what they all have in common. Most of them forge a world where young people live without their grown up mentors. They are, or become self-reliant, ultimately showing that they can govern themselves better without them. Secondly, they almost all feature a female protagonist.  She is not perfect by any means, but that is the point.  She is not always nice. She is not always pretty (except in the films, of course.) Divergent’s Tris is supposed to have an unacceptably long nose, and Katniss finds having to think about her appearance irksome and annoying: she can’t bear removing her body hair and spends a great deal of her time covered in welts, burns and scratches. But she is fit and strong and able to keep up.  She’s a survivor.

In 2008 we saw President Obama move into ‘The White House.’ He gave electrifying speeches promising change, and seemed younger, fitter and more progressive than any President since Kennedy. There was a feel good sense of ‘out with the old.’ Over in Britain, in the following year, we had to put up with our middle aged politicians being exposed for fiddling their expenses and ripping off the tax payer. And then, we had to put up with the economic collapse, caused by know it all bankers playing fast and loose with our money. Mostly middle aged; mostly men. And then there was Gordon Brown. He was no Barack Obama.

So, I get it.  I get why we embraced Dystopian fiction. There was a lot of corruption out there. There were a lot of middle aged blokes in suits trying to justify their actions. And then there was the wind of change, blowing over from the States: a dynamic, charismatic leader from a minority group. And young women were waiting for a Katniss or a Tris: it was about time the Disney Princesses and Bridget Jones’ were usurped.

We’d been waiting.

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Lorna is a writer and teacher. You can find her over at lsyred.wordpress.com. Find more posts by Lorna here...