Dystopia in Science Fiction
Sci-fi writers like talking about our world by pretending to talk about another world. They're sneaky and nuanced like that.
And one of sci-fi writers favorite ways to do this is to depict dystopia. Some of us may have heard the word before, but for those of us who haven't, dystopia is the opposite of utopia. A utopian society is wonderful: people are free and happy and the sun's shining and everything's just dandy. In a dystopia people are oppressed, they're miserable, and everything they do is controlled by some authority.
Some of the most famous sci-fi works—like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984—are futuristic depictions of dystopia. Sci-fi writers love warning us: "If we continue down this road our society will look like this in a hundred, or a thousand years. And it ain't pretty."
Chew On This
Mildred, a character in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, is supposed to be happy. But she isn't. Hmm. Maybe because she lives in a dang dystopia?
How can we be happy if we're conditioned from the time we're embryos not to have any free will? The dystopian society of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World leaves people very little room to escape their destiny.