The Dystopia Muddle

[JaeDarcy]

So, I've been spending a lot of time lately noodling about the fragile line between sci-fi and dystopia.

It seems like dystopia has become something of a dirty four-letter (eight-letter?) word in publishing lately. But I feel like a lot of SF has been caught up in that net that I wouldn't classify as strictly dystopian. Which sort of sucks.

I feel like every story that takes place in the future on our current timeline and planet is sort of being painted with the dystopian brush and doomed. Am I wrong?

To my mind, in a dystopian story, the primary struggle or conflict is between the protagonist and the government or society.

But it feels like stories that predict plague, environmental decay, or any shift in society get pulled into the "dystopia" vortex and subsumed, spit out and rejected. (And, to my mind, the seeds of all those stories could easily feature in a *present day* story.)

I guess I'm wondering if you agree that a story set in a future world, where the environment may be eroded or society irrevocably altered, that ISN'T primarily about people fighting a totalitarian government, is a dystopian story.

And if you do, is there any room left room for realistic SF that isn't set in space?

 

[Coast]

I see a dytopia mainly as setting. Everything is bad, the government is authoritarian, environment decaying, and so on. So I definitely think you can have a story that isn't related to fighting the government and still call it dystopian.

As for the 'tarring with the same brush' effect, I think you'll always see this where a property becomes popular or mainstream. So in this case I think probably Hunger Games and Maze Runner and similar are to blame(?). The same way space opera's get described as 'Like Star Wars'.

I think there's always room for an original take on what exists, or that breaks the mold in some way.

 

[JaeDarcy]

I see a dytopia mainly as setting. Everything is bad, the government is authoritarian, environment decaying, and so on. So I definitely think you can have a story that isn't related to fighting the government and still call it dystopian.

But doesn't that rather conflate dystopian and pessimistic?
I mean, what you say above ("government is authoritarian, environment decaying") some would argue is happening today. Is it possible, even, to write realistically about the future WITHOUT being dystopian at best and post-apocalyptic at worst?

 

[goldhawk]

Climate change and the sluggish economy has everyone down. This makes people likely to see optimism as a fairy tale.

 

[tinkerdan]

Dystopias and Utopias have this strange relationship; in that one mans Utopia can easily be another mans Dystopia. This means that it's very easy to create a broad enough brush that paints many things under the umbrella. In most Dystopic tales the goal is to take a what if, such as Heinlein's If this goes on... and picture the darkest most remote and frightening parts that the characters have to pit themselves against. This can be anything really and so yes you could take the notion that present government spend as much time taking steps backwards while moving us forwards so the future often looks pretty bleak. Trying to build one man's ideal of religion into a future reality can really push civilization backwards until it becomes a frightening steamroller that takes out anything and anyone who fails to conform.

The same thing goes for government.

Though this can possibly look like combining dystopic with pessimistic, I think one goal in fiction and setting the dystopia into motion is for the hope for an optimistic message as the protagonists begin to recognize the fright and begins a fight or flight reaction. The thing is; trying to deal with and escape a utopia is not that exciting a story until you can rip away the veneer to reveal the horror underneath.

With that in mind I'd guess that you could begin to place a lot of fiction in this genre. I just recently got around to finally reading David Feintuch Midshipman's Hope and that comes to mind as a sort of dystopic tale when you examine how backward things must have gone to have space vessels operated like sea faring vessels out of our historic past. And the fine detail of the rules of the world that Nicholas Seafort has to navigate begin to seem quite frightening at times and as a reader I kept hoping he'd wake up and realize the horror and try to do something about it. That doesn't happen in the first book and I'm not sure when I'll get to the rest of them to find out if he does wake up or if he will forever embrace those rules as the safest way to voyage through the greater distances of space.

 

[Coast]

I'd absolutely say that a dystopia is a pessimistic outlook. And a utopia is it's optimistic opposite.
Like tinkerdan mentions, the Protagonist might be optimistic in fighting against tyranny, but the world itself is a pessimistic setting.

As far as our world turning into a dystopia, it's easy to draw lines from our troubles today to a horrible future, and I think that's a major attraction in those stories. Whether we go that way or not?

I, for one, love a messed up world (fictionally)!!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

're the market. When my not-dystopic but fairly bleak Inish Carraig was bring subbed I was told that the big publishers had bought a lot of dystopia after The Hunger Games and that it was being counted as their sf titles and affecting sales in sf, too.

 

[Toby Frost]

Well, technically I think “dystopian” would come to cover any story set in an unpleasant setting (so Mad Max would count) but the practical use of the word by almost everyone seems to be “like 1984”. As far as I can tell, “dystopian” and “post-apocalyptic” are the opposite ends of the scale.

I think the main question is whether you’re writing for a young adult market or not. Outside YA, it probably doesn’t matter. In YA, there was a rush of stories where teenagers rebel against the state which forces them to (insert arbitrary oppressive rule). I suppose that worked well with the fact that teenagers tend to be discovering their place in the world and not being happy about it, but the fad does seem to have passed.

Can you write optimistically about the future? I think so, although I can’t imagine any society, good or bad, that doesn’t have a few dirty secrets or moral grey areas. Iain M Banks’ Culture novels spring to mind. At the moment, as so many “isms” are shown not to work very well, and the world seems to be falling apart, it’s hard to be optimistic, but I think SF could be. I would imagine that a lot of military SF of the “US marines in space” variety is optimistic, in that the bad guys lose and liberty prevails.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

The same thing happened to cyberpunk, and you can - at a push - still write good cyberpunk. It's a matter of attitude, really. If you have the chops as an author you can turn any commercially successful sub-genre upside down.

 

[J Riff]

Don't like a good amount of it. Feels like conditioning the youth culture for a bleak future. *

 

[SciFrac]

For this very reason, to separate myself from dystopian, I'm writing a middle-grade novel that's a fairly optimistic fantasy/sci-fi set in the distant future. There's a lot of humor, which is more common for younger readers, but the whole world changes based on your character's perceptions.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Do what China Mieville does - "feck off, sub-genres!"