{"id":4576,"date":"2017-07-26T12:42:17","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T12:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-rise-of-dystopian-fiction-from-soviet-dissidents-to-70s-paranoia-to-murakami\/"},"modified":"2019-03-25T13:17:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T17:17:35","slug":"the-rise-of-dystopian-fiction-from-soviet-dissidents-to-70s-paranoia-to-murakami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-rise-of-dystopian-fiction-from-soviet-dissidents-to-70s-paranoia-to-murakami\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Dystopian Fiction: From Soviet Dissidents to 70’s Paranoia to Murakami"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

George Orwell is back in vogue these days\u200a\u2014\u200aa far cry from 2014, when The Guardian<\/em> was debating whether or not 1984 <\/em>was good bad or bad good fiction<\/a>. In January this year, 1984<\/em> shot up the bestseller charts, and the trail doesn\u2019t just go cold there. Soon joining it at the top were 1984<\/em>\u2019s old dystopian buddies, Brave New World<\/em> and It Can\u2019t Happen Here<\/em>; in the meantime, sales of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale <\/em>were up 30 percent in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are re-reading these past giants of the genre, even though we\u2019re used to the idea of dystopia in our pop culture by now. (Credit where credit\u2019s due: The Hunger Games<\/em> was something of a big factor.) Yet the dystopian novel\u200a\u2014\u200aas we know it, in its full totalitarian glory\u200a\u2014\u200ais itself a relatively new phenomenon. Before 1900, only the British satirist Jonathan Swift wrote books that could, with one eye squinted, be called dystopian. So when did dystopias and dystopian themes start taking off in modern fiction? And is there a pattern to their rise and fall throughout the past?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Origins<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

First, there was the concept of utopia, the yin to dystopia\u2019s yang. The former sprung from the mind of Sir Thomas More, who wrote Utopia <\/em>in 1516. Ironically, More possessed serious reservations about the existence of utopias. (The word itself could be a pun, derived from the Greek word u-topos <\/em>(\u201cno place\u201d) and also eu-topos<\/em> (\u201cgood place\u201d)<\/a>. Such a good place, More seemed to reason, was not anything we knew, and so it must not exist.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If a utopia is a place that\u2019s too good to exist, a dystopia is a place that we certainly don\u2019t want <\/em>to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, we can define dystopia as \u201can imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one\u201d (OED<\/em>, 2017). The first public usage <\/em>goes <\/em>all the way back to John Stuart Mill in 1868. In a speech to the House of Commons, Mill said, \u201cIt is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians\u201d (\u2018cacotopia\u2019 was relegated to the Wastepaper Basket of History). But it wasn\u2019t until about 50 years afterward, when authors made the word their own, that the idea of dystopia began to actually take root in the public consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1920s & 30s: Defining The Genre<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Perhaps it makes sense that the modern dystopian novel emerged at the turn of the 20th century. It was a time of political unrest and global anxiety, with two world wars awaiting in the near future. Jack London\u2019s 1908 novel Iron Heel<\/em> was said to be a remarkable prophecy of the impending international tensions that would give way to World War I. Yet we don\u2019t see dystopian fiction becoming a more defined genre until the publication of Yevgeny Zamyatin\u2019s slender We<\/em> in 1921.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before We<\/em>, fiction about an \u201cideal\u201d society (with the exception of H.G. Wells and London) tended to end utopian. After We<\/em>, the genre took a grim downturn (or upturn, depending on which way you\u2019re squinting). We<\/em> set up many of the tropes that would come to dominate dystopian fiction. These included troubled, unresolved endings (very fun!) and a totalitarian government gone mad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also importantly, Zamyatin\u2019s book greatly influenced two fictional works that tower over the rest of the genre to this day: Orwell\u2019s 1984 <\/em>and Aldous Huxley\u2019s 1939 Brave New World<\/em>. Both were written in the shadow of a world war. Both predicted an even darker future. Admittedly, the worlds within these two dystopian novels differ vastly, and the influences that Orwell and Huxley feared were not the same. According to critic Neil Postman<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But the stage for the genre was set, in spite of any differences. In this early crop of dystopian fiction, we can see the themes over which future novels would continue to obsess: political capital, the meaning of free will, and, perhaps most significantly, fear of the state and the unchecked power of government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prominent Dystopian Fiction from the Era<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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