The characters in the book talk often about keeping a “little fire burning” within themselves. They can teach us that even in a hopeless world there is, ironically, always hope to be found. I could choose so many quotes from The Road, but this one eloquently sums up why dystopias can be so valuable. Do you understand? And you can’t give up, I won’t let you.” “Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you’re happy again, then you’ll have given up. The Father and Son wander through the broken world These predictions can act as warnings and thought experiments helping us to think about what we might become. They both work in the realm of the impossible becoming the possible. This is why dystopian fiction so often overlaps with science-fiction. The best of fiction predicts, sometimes with terrifying accuracy. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” “There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. This is what dystopian fiction can do – ask the question. Each person must find an answer for themselves. Perhaps these questions cannot be answered by fiction, but they can be asked, and that is perhaps even more important, because there surely can be no single answer. When pushed to our very limits, do humans tend towards good, or evil? The power of dystopias is that they can show the worst of humanity, in the safe-space of fiction. “Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?” This kind of immediate interest is, in general, much harder to write in utopian fiction, where the world is inherently one without conflict. But who has the power to do that? It sets up a whole world immediately, and makes us want to know more about this world, while also adding that touch of creeping unease that permeates the whole of the book. In what may be the best first line in history, George Orwell’s 1984 immediately lays the seed of a question in the mind of the reader: why is the clock striking thirteen? It sounds unnatural, like the number of hours in a day has changed. Nothing hooks readers in like a good first line. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ![]() ![]() It does a very similar thing: shows us possibilities of what our world could be, but this time if we make the wrong decisions, at the right time. ![]() In my last post I talked about utopian fiction, and about how at its best it shows us what we are capable of as a species, if we make the right decisions at the right times.ĭystopia could be called utopia’s evil twin. So why is it that dystopias continue to fascinate us as writers and as readers? ![]() Often, these stories take place after the disaster has taken place. Whole worlds that seem to have gone down a very different path to our own, resulting in disaster. Whether that comes from the characters or the world they inhabit, the DNA of a story is built upon struggle and reactions to that struggle.īecause of this it makes sense that dystopian fiction is among some of the most popular stories out there – both to read and to write. Winston writes in his diary under the watchful eyes of the ruling government
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