Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
I have very vivid dreams and nightmares, and my biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we're advanced in every way except in our humanity.
Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.
Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.
When you're a teenager, everything seems like the end of the world, and I don't think that's necessarily a silly thing. You're waking up and becoming aware that the world has problems and those problems affect you, whereas when you're young they don't seem to affect you that much even if you're aware of them. This dystopian trend picks up on that little part of your life where everything feels really extreme and it honors that part of your life and says, "Yeah. It is the end of the world. Look at it."
He who controls the past controls the future.
I feel as if dystopian and utopian representations are historically the most effective way of criticizing modern society. You know, because you don't have to be factually accurate. You can kind of construct some awesome strawman arguments in your fictional world.
Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.
Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.
I suspect the popularity of young adults and dystopian novels has something to do with a desire for allegory and old-fashioned morality tales. In fact, you might find your religious framework here in dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction. Here, and in videogames, you find strict codes of authority, the "rules of the game," the life-or-death quest and struggle that people crave.
I think the power of image is in mystery - I endlessly create mysteries, by way of this dystopian message, to initiate intrigue.
People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
I don't buy into the dystopian scenarios of self-aware robots enslaving mankind, but you don't have to be a sci-fi conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that plenty of good, well-paying jobs are being taken over by machines.
I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today.
Parents are already telling their kids about falling in love online - there's nothing "frightening" or "dystopian" about this. So, the critique doesn't work, because we already consider our dystopic state of affairs normal.
I haven't written a novel or something that long, because I really am improvising all along and the story is growing new limbs to do what it needs to do. So there's very little planning. There's a little planning where I say, "Well, it looks like I'm going in this direction, ok, good." But there's very little forethought or intellectual justification: "Oh, look, I'm putting in a theme park because that represents dystopian America!"
I think that a lot of dystopian literature tends to be really moralizing and just doesn't tend to give credence to the importance of the sentimental. Maybe it says, "We need love in this world," but it's always this tough, strong statement.
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
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