The Potential in Dystopias

Of all the genres one can write in, as a literary guy, I find the dystopia to have the most potential to share an overt message.

I enjoy literature that teaches me or gives me perspective or, in short, gets at some truth. That's pretty much why I read literature. Sure, I like to be entertained, but I also like to be changed. I like to see the world in a different way. I like to see some truth.

The best dystopias take some aspect of our world, our currents times, and then turn the volume up on that aspect. Orwell's 1984 turns up the volume on authoritarianism... something Orwell saw as a threat in his times. (In that way, the book is still relevant). 

Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale turns up the volume on attacks on women's rights. Thus, it's no wonder in our current times, that the book and the streaming series are so popular and terrifying at the same time.

Orwell and Atwood are using some future setting, some imagined bleak future, not to depress us but instead to say, "This is where we could be headed. This, in more subtle ways, might be where we already are."

Burgess's A Clockwork Orange set out to say something about the desensitization towards violence, especially in the young... but also the authoritarian desire to control such violence at the expense of free will.

Of course, you have to mention Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and its messages about the suppression of art, especially art that might offend or say something melancholy. At the same time, the book rails at technology and people's desire to live on the surface of things through technology. He worried about people wanting to be entertained, rather than think, feel, and truly ruminate on what it is to be a human being. It's so interesting that in our times, we are seeing the eroding of attention spans. Books don't need to be banned or burned because fewer and fewer people are reading them. No offense to those who indulge, but too many people want to scroll through Tik Tok video after Tik Tok video rather than read a book in their downtime. It leads to a world in which people aren't paying attention to what matters... as in the end of Bradbury's classic when so many people are caught flatfooted by the atomic war that's been impending over the course of the book, but nobody was really paying attention.

(You might say that Tik Toks can get at important things, but I wonder if their brevity truly allows for the proper rumination. They seem to be designed to watch one after another and elicit a brief emotion or thought that is soon replaced by the next brief emotion or thought.)

Of course, dystopias have become, for good or bad, a thing more relegated to YA literature, especially with the popularity of The Hunger Games. I think those books too say something about our world, but maybe not as in depth as dystopias written for adults.

When I set out to write my new novel, Rules of Order, I wanted to write a dystopia for adults. I wanted to say something about our world by projecting a future world that shows the consequences of our current living. And yet, too, the circumstances of that future world reflect what we are currently going through as regards the protection of our climate and dangers of greed and individual rationalization.

I hope too it tells a good story with interesting characters and an engaging plot. I mean, any dystopia has to have that... otherwise you just get a long diatribe masquerading as a novel.

If you're interested in reading a new dystopian novel, consider checking out mine, Rules of Order: here

If you're a writer and want to try a dystopia, I would suggest reading some of the classics to truly understand how the genre works.