Why Do We Love Dystopian Fiction?

(even when it makes everybody sad)

May 21, 2024

One of the first posts I wrote on this substack was a listicle of my five favorite non-dystopian speculative fictions.

Why non-dystopia?

Thank you for asking.

You see, I have this work-in-progress theory of speculative fiction operating as an ideological lighthouse on the shore of the future.

We - people alive today - are paddling around rather desperately off-shore, as various squalls and gusts throw us hither-thither and tip icy seawater down our necks. It can be pretty dark out there, on the ocean of life, and speculative fiction is doing good work in casting a strong beam around so we can see what’s what with the water all around us and look up ahead at the shore, where there are dangerous rocks and inviting inlets.

I like non-dystopian fiction because I’m a fan of inviting inlets, and I fear that we won’t even begin paddling our way towards them if we don’t even know they exist.

Other folks, however, seem to be in it for the rocks.

I get it - rocks are scary and there is a comfort in knowing that they are all around you. Especially if you somehow feel their presence. Because maybe they’re not rocks. Maybe they’re sharks.

Dystopian fiction illuminates the sharks and lets you get a good, long, look at them. It’s thrilling. And comforting. Especially when the sharks are up there, at least a little bit away from the waters around your boat.

Is that why we read dystopian fiction?

A personal segue…

The loneliest I’ve ever felt was on a trip to France when I was fifteen. I went by myself, stayed with a host family who didn’t like me very much (I was probably a pain) and they spoke about as much English as I did French; basically none.

I didn’t have any friends or people nearby my own age, and I deliberately didn’t bring a stack of English books because, went my brain, it would be good motivation to learn more French so that I could read more French.

Four weeks into this eight-week experience, I found a dog-chewed copy of George Orwell’s 1984 at the back of a shelf in my host-mother’s living room.

I had read 1984 before. I knew that it wasn’t exactlly an uplifting or hopeful tale.

But I devoured that novel, read it obsessively. Even when other lighter English literary fare did eventually cross my path, I couldn’t stop immersing myself in Winston's doleful solitude, his trudging endurance. I revelled in his eternity; a gray city of perpetual rationing and war, the very thoughts in his head policed with violence and dehumanizing fear.

I would be going home in just a handful of weeks. I had chosen to spend my summer walking in solitary circles around freezing foreign streets. The worst anyone was going to do to me was yell (quite a bit). Or ask for ID when I was buying booze (that never happenned. French shop-keepers proved a trusting bunch).

I delighted in this severely dystopian fiction because I was miserable and it made me feel brave, while also placing my problems in perspective.

Is that a common experience?

Now for a list of really wonderful dystopias…

The top three featured ‘Science Fiction’ categories on Amazon are “Adventure”, “Dystopian”, and “Post-Apocalyptic”. This post isn’t an attempt to analyze literary categories or sales - I haven’t done that yet and someone else has probably done it better elsewhere.

But I don’t think it’s controversial to claim that people seem to love dystopia.

The end of the world? Mushrooms in your brain? Dust bowls and alien overlords?

We will read it, play it, watch it, gobble up all that horribleness.

It says a lot, I think, about our collective moment of global anxiety that we crave tales of people in places much worse than here. We yearn, perhaps, for vicarious revenge against corporations, dictatorships, destitution, and disaster. Or maybe we just seek confirmation for the death-drop void of existential dread.

Don’t you dare tell me to hope, I’m just hoping to get through this day, and the one after that, and all the rest until to dust I return.

Maybe that’s too dark.

I, too, still have an appetite for dystopian fictions. My favorites I think cast an unforgiving beam onto horrors I have been shoving awkwardly into a corner of my consciousness. Look here, these novels say. This is your world. And it’s important that you see it. When a writer can make the voyage down a malign narrative path an exhilarating and poetic experience, then of course, I follow them, and I am grateful for the light their story shines. Returning to reality, I am sometimes overwhelmed by relief. The sharks are circling, but our boats sail true, and there are hours yet before the last light of the setting sun seeps from the sky.

In thinking through the dystopian fictions that I am most grateful for, I have alighted on five. Five dystopias, to match these five non-dystopias.

Are you ready? If you’re still reading, then you probably are.

Ok, now here’s the list…

Number one, you’ve almost definitely read.

1984 by George Orwell.

Yes, its my companion on my lonely French voyage.

Whether it’s the brutalist urban design, the everyday surveillance, the subsumption of self to a vacuous and belligerent state, the promotion of meaningless media to numb the critical faculties of an otherwise potentially restless population; this book contains horrors that feel viscerally possible. 1984 is a literary scream.

Be aware!

Most chilling for me is that passage explaining Newspeak;

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

If there was ever an endorsement of writers as resistance fighters and words as weapons - this is it!

Number two - you’ve also quite probably read it.

The City and the City by China Miéville.

This book feels to me like an alt 1984 history in some ways; in the reign of psychological terror and control that prevents an entire population from acknowledging, nay from even seeing, the people and buildings of a foreign state that exists (at least physically speaking) cheek by jowl beside their own

I can imagine inhabiting such a world.

And that - making a speculation viscally imaginable - is the poisoned heart of a compelling dystopia.

Number three…it’s fairly commercial and graced some best-seller list somewhere, so there’s a good chance you know it. Although I (and the friend who recommended it to me) are the only people I’ve personally met familiar with this tale.

The Waterknife by Paolo Bacigalupi.

This is a narrtive set in a near-future American southwest decimated by catastrophic drought, where water is society’s most valued resource and subject to the most violent and extreme forms of capitalist exploitation. It’s not exactly a light read. But it is thrilling. And sexy - if a hired thug with scars and a bright yellow teslas is your definition of sexy.

Seriously though, the worldbuilding in this novel is on-point.

Within the first five pages, the easy integration of speculative technologies and urban building projects establish the value of water and the socio-political disintegration that has resulted from its scarcity.

Read the first chapter, at least. And then I will understand if you also get a little confused about human respiration later on, after the umpteenth time a character “lets out their breath” during a three minute conversation.

On to number four.

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

The title kind of says it. All the men die. Like, in the entire world. Conceived apparently as a thought experiment about what a world run by women (and people assigned female at birth) would look like, this is a mulit-perspective thriller that I happened to read during a COVID-19 lockdown in LA. It’s ambitious. And devastating.

I’m just waiting for this book to be turned into a film. Directed by Greta Gerwig perhaps.

And finally, number five.

This was a book I brought to an ‘anti-book-club’ that I recently attended. That’s a book club where everyone brings a different book because no-one has time to read anyone else’s book and we probably all like different things…

Anyway. I bought this one.

Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein

It’ a YA novel by an Australian author, first published in 1992 and set in a dystopic Eastern Australia around the year 2000, where state structures have fractured enough for precariously housed children to be picked-off by an alien society, who kidnap them to a foreign world and force them to perform death-defying gymnastics for an enchanted insectoid clientele.

Except of course that’s not really what’s happening at all.

The reality is far, far, more horrifying - and written apparently for readers aged 12.

This was another novel that I clung to in times of loneliness.

I read it on repeat when I felt like an outsider, and when I felt like I was failing. I emoted with the young narrator who is terrible at gymnastics and therefore likely to be nefariously disappeared from the Galax Arena and its multicultural ad-hoc society of world-hardened, street-smart, physically talented and visciously ambitious children.

Because I think that’s the core of why I - and others - return to dystopia. In the darkest of places and at the darkest of times, we take heart from spending time entwined in the minds of characters who are brave, who are passionate, who fight to make things better.

Even when they fail. They encourage us, still, to try.

But what about you? Why do you read tales of the end of the world? The disintegration of society? The erosion of climate, justice, and human rights? Why do you think we find this so very compelling?