The History of Dystopia by Jamie Mollart

Dystopian fiction in its current form has been around for a long time. It’s been a prominent escape route from our daily life and has been a reflection of our collective fears and concerns for a couple of hundred years.

Since the events of 2020, and now 2021, have begun to make it look as if we’re actually living in a Dystopia, I’ve begun questioning what the place of Dystopian fiction is in our consciousness and whether it’s possible to cover new ground in a genre that increasingly looks like a mirror to the world, rather than a flight of fantasy.

I have a vested interest to declare here. I have a Dystopian fiction novel due to be published this summer, Kings of a Dead World, and as I’ve gone through the editing process it’s seemed more and more horribly prescient.

The truth is people like the black and white of extremes, think right back to the Garden of Eden and Hell, so we needed to build a Utopia in order to define a Dystopia.

It was, however, authors who took control of the word and rooted it in our lexicon. Jack London’s ‘Iron Heel’ and Yevgeny Zamyatins ‘We’ were front runners and there’s no coincidence that they book-ended the First World War.

Dystopian fiction is almost always fired by global events – World Wars, Pandemics, the War on Terror –  all of them have seen a boom in popularity of stories about the end of the world.

So, what is it that makes people enjoy Dystopia from a psychological point of view?

Some of it can be put down to simple Schadenfreude; the sense of taking pleasure from other people’s misfortune. In a very unpleasant, basic way human beings are wired to find satisfaction in other people’s problems, if it’s happening to them it’s not happening to us.

But we also have a morbid fascination in disaster. We see it in the slowing of traffic on a motorway to view a crash, in the obsession with reality TV shows and in the obsessive hitting of the refresh button on news about Covid-19. It’s a kind of group rubbernecking, and if it’s at a distance and removed we can observe it and take lessons without suffering the pain.

There’s no doubt people like to psychologically prepare for real disasters by taking a dry run and Dystopian fiction plays into this beautifully. It acts as a dress rehearsal for potential horrors.

We live in a world, which pandemic excluded, is the safest it’s ever been. Max Roser, an economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University says “We live in a much more peaceful and inclusive world than our ancestors of the past. The news is very much focused on singular events. All of these trends that I’m looking at are slow changes that happen over decades, or sometimes even centuries. These developments never have a ‘now’ moment that would make them interesting for news that is following current events.’

Murder rates are down globally, poverty is down globally, there is more readily available democracy than ever before, people are working less hard than ever before, there is more economic success and education than at any point in our history, technological advances are happening at an unprecedented rate.

And yet all of this comes at a price.

For a lot of people, myself included, awareness of the Climate Crisis is a constant chatter in their subconscious, and with it a sense of an impending reckoning where we will be faced with the consequences of the way we’ve played fast and loose with the world.

One of the problems with understanding Climate Change is that it can easily be seen as an issue that is too big for one person to have an impact on and so a modern Dystopia serves as a clean slate, wiping away everything that we’ve done to the world without having to imagine the steps in between. It is a shorthand way of jumping to the end of the story and enabling us to consider consequences without having to live through the horror that will get us there.

Equally an imagined Dystopian world can help us cope with a perceived stressful reality in the same way that horror movies do. It enables us to explore our worst fears in a way that isn’t immediately threatening, and this is exciting. It engages our fight and flight mechanism, kicks in the adrenaline, but in a controlled way. We can walk away from it safely and then consider what we’ve seen. It’s part of our way of coping with the rigours of the world.

Because we’re human beings though, forewarned is not always forearmed. We have a collective self destructive nature, an ability to ignore the bigger picture, and politically we work in a cyclical nature, you just need to look at American President’s approach to climate change to see this on a relatively short time scale.

Writing in the Guardian, Obama said ‘During the course of my presidency, I made climate change a top priority, because I believe that, for all the challenges that we face, this is the one that will define the contours of this century more dramatically perhaps than the others. No nation, whether it’s large or small, rich or poor, will be immune from the impacts of climate change. We are already experiencing it in America, where some cities are seeing floods on sunny days, where wildfire seasons are longer and more dangerous, where in our arctic state, Alaska, we’re seeing rapidly eroding shorelines, and glaciers receding at a pace unseen in modern times.’

Trump’s attitude to Climate Change is the opposite, at once extreme and startling: “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” and “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Then, four years later I’m writing this as Biden is about to be inaugurated, and the news is reporting that he will undo up to 17 of Trump’s executive orders on day one of his presidency.

According to Paul Bledsoe, climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House, “Day one, Biden will rejoin Paris, regulate methane emissions and continue taking many other aggressive executive climate actions in the opening days and weeks of his presidency.’

There’s a microcosm of human behaviour here playing out in the role of the leader of the world’s biggest polluter. Human attitudes change in a cyclical nature and Dystopian fiction by necessity changes with them. In its role to discuss our worst fears it changes along with the geopolitical and socio economic landscape it reflects.

Here and now in 2021 we’re faced with the worst health crisis in a century, huge swathes of the globe are in lockdown, hospitals are filling up and economic disaster is piling up around the world. To all intents and purposes we feel like we could be living out the plot of a Dystopian novel. If anyone has watched Twelve Monkeys recently it suddenly doesn’t seem so fantastical. What has personally surprised me is that even in the midst of all this horror, our desire to delve into Dystopia hasn’t waned. For weeks at the start of the first lockdown Outbreak was trending on Netflix.

If Dystopian fiction is a mirror to our current concerns and a practice run for imagined horrors, then Covid-19 has served to bring our long standing relationship with the genre into sharp focus. Waterstones have reported a surge of sales of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 and Brave New World during lockdown, whilst online sales of Stephen King’s The Stand increased by 163% in the first week of March last year.

So are we living in a Dystopia now? The answer is no and the reason being a subtle but important distinction.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Margaret Attwood, the grand dame of modern Dystopia and author of The Handmaid’s Tale, said “a Dystopia, technically, is an arranged unpleasant society that you don’t want to be living in. This one was not arranged. So people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism. It’s not a deliberate arrangement.”

What we are doing though is living through a time when we are as close in living memory to something that reminds us of the potential of Dystopian fiction and this affects us on a deep level.

The last living UK veteran of World War 1 died in 2009, The Spanish Flu and World War 2 will soon be out of living memory, Covid-19 is a worldwide trauma which is forcing us to look again at our collective fears, and with that comes a desire to delve back into Dystopia.

Speaking more broadly you have to ask is Covid-19 going to help us learn our lessons and lead to a more Utopian culture?

I truly hope so, but history tells us this hope is unfortunately probably unfounded. As discussed, Dystopia is a mirror to our fears, so it will always hold an important place in our culture until we agree on Utopia. (An aim which appears contrary to human nature.)

Dystopia holds a unique position in the literary canon because it speaks to us on a primal level and answers deep needs within the human psyche.

As the challenges the human race faces change so too will the Dystopian fiction that it consumes.

And this is why it will always be relevant. Until we fix the flaws in our species’s nature there will always be new ground for Dystopian fiction to cover.

Climate News

Are you an educator, blogger or graphic designer? Would you like to get involved in climate activism as an online volunteer? The Climate Fiction Writers League is working with Jointly Earth to find activists who can volunteer some time to help the group develop further into a resource for teachers and librarians. If you would have a few hours to spare, you can help us with Outreach, Graphic and Web Design and Curriculum Development. There are lots of other opportunities on the website to work with other environmental groups if none of those are a fit for you.

How Biden is reversing Trump’s assault on the environment [The Guardian]

Waiting to Address Climate Change Will Cost Trillions of Dollars [Gizmodo]

The Shift Toward Clean Cars [NY Times]

How to spot the tricks Big Oil uses to subvert action on climate change [Vox]

League member Laura Lam and University of Edinburgh evolutionary biologist Sinead Collins have launched C.Y.O.TOPIA, or Choose Your Own Topia, a YouTube series that investigates two different approaches to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 to build these two versions of a future, and discover what we can do collectively to bring about a better world.

An extract from new book The New Climate War, where scientist Michael Mann explores the concept of ‘soft doomism’ and how it threatens vital action [Crikey]