Let's talk about dystopias

[Christine Wheelwright]

My work in progress is set in a dystopian future. Yes, I know, that doesn’t sound very original. But it occurs to me that most literary dystopias are caused by an identifiable event or disaster of some sort. An asteroid, pandemic, war, zombie apocalypse or alien invasion. Alternatively, there may be an evil oppressor or malicious political force of some kind.

In my novel there has been no catastrophe. And rather than being manipulated, society has drifted into dystopia. There is no conspiracy, no supervillain or dark secretive cabal intent on enslaving its fellow man. Instead, a grim future simply creeps up on the World through a process of overpopulation, environmental attrition and a well-meaning but disastrous Libertarian political philosophy that promotes self interest over collective action, individual autonomy over the common good. This leaves mankind impotent, even as it descends into dystopia.

This has got me wondering; are there other examples, within the SF literary canon, of accidental, organic, creeping dystopias? I can’t think of any, but I am not as well read as some folks here.

 

[J-Sun]

Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room is about overpopulation more or less just happening. It's a little different, but things like Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky is mostly a generation starship story but it also becomes a dystopia by social amnesia. There are a lot of things, from Saberhagen's Berserkers to Reynolds Melding Plague stuff which involve the release of technologies which may have military purposes but are supposed to remain contained but don't stay that way. I'll think on it some more because I'm sure I'm forgetting some obvious stuff.

Yours sounds interesting and doesn't make me immediately think of something else just like it, though. Flipside is that I'm kind of dystopia'd out. We're living in one already so I'd rather read more optimistic stuff, generally.

 

[J-Sun]

Yeah, after Make Room! Make Room! (to get the title right), I should have thought about Silverberg's The World Inside. That one's interesting because, while there arguably is a sort of oppressive Big Brother, I'd argue otherwise - rather than Big Brother brainwashing the masses, the masses have adopted an oppressive society which, for the few rebels, means they are Big Brother, but it's not a malicious manipulation, exactly. Self-brainwashing. (This made me retroactively think of your recent August reading post and I'd say that A Time of Changes is good, The Book of Skulls is better but not actually SF, and I'd recommend the novella version of Hawksbill Station - I haven't read the novel version but, based on a friend's description of it, it inflates a weaker part of the novella to reach book-length. It's definitely a dystopia, though, but the more usual kind.)

As far as others, my memory is probably very shaky on a lot of this stuff and I'm getting it wrong but there are dystopias that just come from the brutal laws of physics, such as Hal Clement's The Nitrogen Fix and anything else where stuff just changes, decays, dies. Wells' The Time Machine combines a bit of this and bit of social decay to produce the dystopian eras of The Time Machine. While much more theoretical soft science, anything which adopts a Toynbeean or Spenglerian (or biological) view of history (such as Blish's Cities in Flight series) can have dystopias arise through the natural aging and deaths of civilization. I think Poul Anderson's late Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire stories show some of this, too (where, ironically in relation to your approach, part of the death of a civilization comes from a loss of the active, expansionist, libertarian youth of a society).

I can't remember the details again, but it seems like A Clockwork Orange may also just sort of happen, if it's not due to Russian Communist infiltration.

Then there are the sort of reverse dystopias, like Williamson's The Humanoids (which Asher's stuff also seems to echo) where the dystopia actually comes from an overzealous effort at utopia, when things happen such as "good" robots actually stultifying humanity for its own good.

And the last thing I can think of is many of the works of PKD which go beyond cyclical history and entropic physics and all the way to an ontological existential spiritual hypercosmic dystopia embedded in the Nature of Things.

 

[Extollager]

Possibly the portions of Michael Faber's The Book of Strange New Things that refer to conditions on Earth; but most of the book is set on another planet.

I have wondered what's going to happen as culture comes up against ineluctable limits, which I think it will. Specifically, I do not think we will ever go to Mars, or, if we do, that's as far from the home planet as we will ever get, for various fairly well-known reasons. But a great many people believe we will "go to the stars." When nearly everyone realizes this just is not going to happen, that may have some unpleasant consequences.

Likewise, many people have the idea that humans will evolve superhero-type psionic abilities, etc. It does not seem that that is going to happen. Nor will lifespans increase as dramatically in the future (I believe) as they have over the past few centuries, any more than, though people have grown taller on average than a few hundred years ago, they will not just keep growing taller till they are giants. This may be disappointing to some people.

I think it likely that many people will come to realize they are less free than their ancestors. You have only to watch teleplays of the mid-1960s TV series The Fugitive to see this. The kind of pull-up-and-start-over life that the fictional Richard Kimball undertakes is just not possible. Read a Dickens novel and it's amazing to see how unsupervised life was in the mid-Victorian period.

And so on. I for one do not see very much on the horizon that will tend to promote in people a sense that human beings are flourishing. What they will feel, will conduce, I suppose, to dystopian developments.

 

[Bramandin]

Not that I was even educated on the fall of the Roman empire, but I've learned that Rome did not fall in a day. I trimmed a bunch of negative personal opinion about the prepper communities, but think that such communities would be rich fodder for you as long as you are not easily triggered into keeping a pantry-rotation and looking into off-grid habitation. Those are fine, just... you're not going to survive TEOTWAWKI unless you made accurate predictions about how it would play out and what to do.

Ping me, I forgot to eat today and am about to go to bed, so I should be more coherent tomorrow.

 

[THX1138]

Have you looked at Logan's Runs for ideas? I'm thinking more on the lines of Logan's life in the dome before he runs, (or assigned to run).

There are many things in today's society that you can use for ideas too, not sure if you already have done so. Social media like Facebook, TikTok or the likes seems to have creeped up on us for what most people follow as a source of 'news'. Even many news stations base stories and such on what they find on these platforms. Just a thought.

 

[THX1138]

Not that I was even educated on the fall of the Roman empire, but I've learned that Rome did not fall in a day. I trimmed a bunch of negative personal opinion about the prepper communities, but think that such communities would be rich fodder for you as long as you are not easily triggered into keeping a pantry-rotation and looking into off-grid habitation. Those are fine, just... you're not going to survive TEOTWAWKI unless you made accurate predictions about how it would play out and what to do.

Ping me, I forgot to eat today and am about to go to bed, so I should be more coherent tomorrow.

Ture. I would think anything with a 'cult like structure' could work, too.

 

[hitmouse]

Ballard is a key reference for wilfully drifting into dystopias for no real reason apart from the human condition. His dystopias are personal, with the main protagonist usually becoming a willing participant.

High Rise : a bunch of wealthy middle-class types get a bit strange in a posh apartment building.
Cocaine Nights : something similar to the above, set in the dissolute expatriate sprawl on the Costa del Sol.
Super Cannes : similar, in a gated corporate compound on the French riviera.

Ballard famously did a series of “environmental” novels, where a one-line pretext is given for some sort of collapse which is arguably just an excuse for a dystopian novel. E.g:
The Drought
The Drowned World
The Crystal World

 

[chrispenycate]

You'll have to write fast; when Brunner wrote his 'Stand on Zanzibar' trilogy (A jagged Orbit, The sheep look up), in the sixties, it had to be written in SF as most of it hadn't yet happened. Now it reads more like current affairs). It sometimes feels as if anything based on human greed and so lipsism is doomed to being overtaken in less than a lifetime (all right, with diminishing life expectancy that many of them predict, perhaps within one man's life).

Sure, a lot of them need wars, plagues or revolutions to achieve chaos I suspect this is to assuage guilt, or simply add enough words for novel length - most straightforward social collapse would fit into a short story.

 

[Pyan]

Let's talk about dystopias

I would, but they're just so depressing...

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

Soylent Green maybe - I can't remember the reason for how they got where they got. There was no "event" just a break down of what we would accept as acceptable (well in our current vegan/vegitarian heading future).

Undoubtably over population will be the end of humanity and the end of most of life on our planet.

 

[HareBrain]

Undoubtably over population will be the end of humanity

Technically, under-population will be the end of humanity.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Not a book (but apparently based on several), we can't have a discussion without including The Demolition Man. Are they living in a utopia, or are they living in the most sanitised dystopia ever created?

I think that dystopias are much more likely to come about gradually over a period of time (as in Soylent Green, Children of Men or Rollerball), than they are because of a single, significant event.

The problem with 'single event' dystopias is that a significant part of the story usually has to deal with the 'before and during' period of 'the event' and then often only dealing with the immediate aftermath (eg The Stand). One of the few books I can remember that takes significant leaps forward in time to show what happens later on is 'Earth Abides'. For me the most interesting stories are those that deal with the aftermath, eg 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and The Road.

 

[BAYLOR]

Limbo by Bernard Wolfe
In Caverns Below by Stanton Coblentz

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

I have wondered what's going to happen as culture comes up against ineluctable limits, which I think it will. Specifically, I do not think we will ever go to Mars, or, if we do, that's as far from the home planet as we will ever get, for various fairly well-known reasons. But a great many people believe we will "go to the stars." When nearly everyone realizes this just is not going to happen, that may have some unpleasant consequences.

@Extollager we are on the same page! Our irrational faith in technology - the belief that it can solve whatever problems we, as humans, create - is a major theme of my work. I agree a Mars mission is technologically a huge challenge; one we are unlikely to achieve. Never ignore the economic, organisational and political aspects (as important as the technological ones).

Read a Dickens novel and it's amazing to see how unsupervised life was in the mid-Victorian period.

Very true. In my dystopia there is no safety net, although charity is encouraged and revered. There is much to say about the use of charity as a salve for societal wounds that might never have been inflicted.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Yeah, after Make Room! Make Room! (to get the title right), I should have thought about Silverberg's The World Inside. That one's interesting because, while there arguably is a sort of oppressive Big Brother, I'd argue otherwise - rather than Big Brother brainwashing the masses, the masses have adopted an oppressive society which, for the few rebels, means they are Big Brother, but it's not a malicious manipulation, exactly. Self-brainwashing. (This made me retroactively think of your recent August reading post and I'd say that A Time of Changes is good, The Book of Skulls is better but not actually SF, and I'd recommend the novella version of Hawksbill Station - I haven't read the novel version but, based on a friend's description of it, it inflates a weaker part of the novella to reach book-length. It's definitely a dystopia, though, but the more usual kind.)

As far as others, my memory is probably very shaky on a lot of this stuff and I'm getting it wrong but there are dystopias that just come from the brutal laws of physics, such as Hal Clement's The Nitrogen Fix and anything else where stuff just changes, decays, dies. Wells' The Time Machine combines a bit of this and bit of social decay to produce the dystopian eras of The Time Machine. While much more theoretical soft science, anything which adopts a Toynbeean or Spenglerian (or biological) view of history (such as Blish's Cities in Flight series) can have dystopias arise through the natural aging and deaths of civilization. I think Poul Anderson's late Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire stories show some of this, too (where, ironically in relation to your approach, part of the death of a civilization comes from a loss of the active, expansionist, libertarian youth of a society).

I can't remember the details again, but it seems like A Clockwork Orange may also just sort of happen, if it's not due to Russian Communist infiltration.

Then there are the sort of reverse dystopias, like Williamson's The Humanoids (which Asher's stuff also seems to echo) where the dystopia actually comes from an overzealous effort at utopia, when things happen such as "good" robots actually stultifying humanity for its own good.

And the last thing I can think of is many of the works of PKD which go beyond cyclical history and entropic physics and all the way to an ontological existential spiritual hypercosmic dystopia embedded in the Nature of Things.

Make Room! Make Room! and The World Inside are both excellent examples. It seems to me that in the former the World is truly on the brink of collapse (they have resorted to eating each other, haven't they?) There seems to be a strong oppressive state, but also corruption, and the opportunity to avoid catastrophe is long past. In The World Inside (which I plan to reread soon) the population has reached 40 billion (?) crammed into huge skyscrapers because the entirity of the land is needed for agriculture (automated). It is a fascinating study of disconnection from nature and loss of privacy. Interestingly, reproduction is lauded (the lamb leading itself to the slaughter). Sex is promoted as a pacifier. Someone also mentioned Logan's Run. It is dystopian but perhaps in a very different way. Strong regulation of society - to the point where inhabitants surrender themselves to rebirth (death) at the age of 30. The inhabitants of my dystopia would be shocked!

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Alternatively, there may be an evil oppressor or malicious political force of some kind.

In 1984, Orwell describes the creation of the three big political blocs - Eurasia / East asia / Oceania as the result of a Nuclear War, but the rise to power of Ingsoc is described, initially as a movement of social equality.

The movement ends up as malicious, but it is not, initially malicious. They rise to power by promising equality and socialism. Orwell describes this as part of a historical cycle where the Middle Caste in any society will, at some point, overturn the highest classes utilising the lowest.

Only after the Middle Classes have established power and deposed the upper class do they slowly do away with any pretence of creating an equal society. From there, we see a progressive slip into totalitarianism as the state iterates various forms of social control - deposing the original leads of the revolution, gradually implementing newspeak, interfering with the nuclear family, banning religion, constant surveillance, control of history, language and thought.

Even in the story we see the iterative process ongoing as Syme describes how they are refining the principles of Newspeak and Doublespeak.

One of Orwell's overarching themes through Animal Farm, 1984 and A Clergyman's Daughter is how revolutions for justice and equity are not undertaken with the intent of setting up an oppressive state, but that they become them after the fact.

 

[Rodders]

I quite enjoy a good Dystopian novel, although I probably haven’t read too many.

Modern day living is rapidly heading towards a dystopian future and I become more and more cynical. On the other hand, I could just be getting old.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Professor Moeller, tackles a similar topic in his critique on "Don't Look Up" from a systems theory perspective. He says systems theorist conceive of society as a series of overlapping systems (the media, the knowledge production industry, the military-industrial complex, government and so on).

"Don't Look Up" tackles the way these systems interact to prevent meaningful action on Climate Change (The dystopia) because each system has its own sets of interests and objectives. In this way, no one person deliberately causes a negative effect, but the structural interests and designs of the various sub-systems prevent meaningful action to be taken.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Half Past Human and The Godwhale by TJ Bass - memorable, though not very good books (The Godwhale regularly crops up as one of those "Help me find a book I remember read years ago." threads. Humankind has overpopulated and 'regressed' to uneducated, mass conformity.

Or how about the grandaddies of them all - Well's The Time Machine and E M Forster's The Machine Stops in which mankind just hands over everything, other than artistic endeavour, to an all-providing, self-repairing machine - which breaks down.