Dystopian Novels and We (and other stuff)

My first real brush with dystopian novels came shortly after my first real girlfriend (we were together 7 months) dumped me. To console my broken heart, I decided (rather counterintuitively) to read 1984 by George Orwell. I was around 19 years old, and I recall very little of that first reading of the book. It was just another component in my summer of wallowing. 

That summer included me getting very drunk on Captain Morgan's at a beach party in Marquette, MI. I saw the woman that had wrecked me at the same party sitting on the sand. I stumbled to her, practically fell, and then rested my head on her thigh. I looked up into her four eyes (she didn't wear glasses, I was just seeing double) and I said, "So what do you think?" She got up, let my head thump into the sand, and walked away. I subsequently passed out and later woke in my own bed (which I learned later my friends had delivered me to) and then suffered through a near-dystopian hangover for the rest of the day and night.

To this day, I still can't drink Captain Morgan's... but I digress.

In my early thirties, I started to dabble in what might be called speculative or slipstream stories... stories not quite set in the reality of our world. As this genre and its potential to truly say something about our world while not being set in our world intrigued me further, I began an independent study in dystopian works. I started by rereading 1984. Then I moved on to A Clockwork Orange, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, and eventually Fahrenheit 451. During my reading, I read B.F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two, which would be considered a Utopian novel... and a really interesting read in its own right.

I know that the dystopian novel is a tried and true (and perhaps abused) genre now, but the folks I was reading seemed to be cutting their teeth on the genre. It makes sense that in the 1930s through 1960s, when the world seemed to be changing exponentially that writers would need to create a futuristic genre that plays with the theme of "Hey wait, we're moving really fast here... and maybe we should take a second to look at how all of our advancements might be corrupting our humanity."

By reading what I was reading, I thought I was reading the canon in dystopian literature... and, largely, I was. With Brave New World, published in 1932, I thought I'd gone back as far as I could. Granted, I didn't get a PhD in Dystopian literature or anything. I'm sure people can point out source material that goes even further back. For instance, was the book Metropolis and its subsequent movie (1925 and 1927) dystopian or science fiction? Or was Twain getting into something dystopian with Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or The Mysterious Stranger? I'm sure in terms of meeting certain dystopian criteria, both of these Twain works would fall under "unique" but not dystopian.

I'm sure there are others who know the dystopian history better than I (that's what the comments section is for!) But, I do recall, in my research coming across the book We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written from 1920-1921 and published in English in 1924.

Not an easy book, but interesting... especially for its influence on dystopian literature. Out of curiosity, I googled "first dystopian novel" and found that in 1907 the novel The Iron Heel was published by Jack London. So, is this the first dystopian novel? I'm not sure, but I'd never heard of it (and just ordered it!)

Earlier, I briefly mentioned B.F. Skinner's utopian novel, Walden Two. Here's an interesting article on the history of the Utopian novel and how it might have lead to the Dystopian novel:

HERE

I set out writing this blog to make people aware of We but the damn Internet (as it often does) reminded me of how little I know. We is probably most like the dystopias with which we are familiar (a world set in the future that turns up the volume on something questionable happening in our current world). In fact, some argue that Orwell was heavily influenced by We and even blatantly lifted elements of the novel for his writing of 1984 (and, ironically, Orwell accused Huxley of the same thing).

You need to check out the Wikipedia page about We. It may not be the first dystopian novel, but of the early works, it certainly sounds like it was the most influential. (While reading that page, I came across another Russian dystopian called Love in the Fog of the Future (which I couldn't find on Amazon... an event in itself that might be dystopian or utopian).

So, in the end, I'm not sure if I've said anything in this blog post... and so you can take comfort in the image of a young me waking with a terrible hangover, still crestfallen, and scratching beach sand from my hair.

Jeff "Van" Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. In 2022, Montag Press will publish his dystopian novel, Falling Sky. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.