Dystopia

A Dystopia is a fictional community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is often treated an an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality contrary of being an instance of simple opposition, as many utopian elements and components are found in dystopias as well, and vice versa.

Dystopias are often characterized by rampant fear or distress, tyrannical governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Despite certain overlaps, dystopian fiction is distinct from post-apocalyptic fiction, and an undesirable society is not necessarily dystopian. Dystopian societies appear in many fictional works and artistic representations, particularly in stories set in the future. The best known by far is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Other famous examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are used to draw attention to society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, or technology. Some authors use the term to refer to existing societies, many of which are, or have been, totalitarian states or societies in an advanced state of collapse. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worse-case scenario, often make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system.

The entire substantial sub-genre of alternative history works depicting a world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War can be considered as dystopias. So can other works of Alternative History, in which a historical turning point led to a massively repressive world. For example, the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, and Ben Winter's Underground Airlines, in which slavery in the United States continues to the present, with "electronic slave auctions" carried out via the internet and slaves controlled by electronic devices implanted in their spines, or Keith Roberts Pavane in which 20th Century Britain is ruled by a Catholic theocracy and the Inquisition is actively torturing and burning "heretics."

Some scholars, such as Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, make certain distinctions between typical synonyms of dystopia. For example, Claeys and Sargent define literary dystopias as societies imagined as substantially worse than the society in which the author writes. Some of these are anti-utopias, which criticize attempts to implement various concepts of utopia. In the most comprehensive treatment of the literary and real expressions of the concept, Dystopia: A Natural History, Claeys offers a historical approach to these definitions. Here the tradition is traced from early reactions to the French Revolution. Its commonly anti-collectivist character is stressed, and the addition of other themes--the danger of science and technology, of social inequality, of corporate dictatorship, of nuclear war--are also traced. A psychological approach is also favored here, with the principle of fear being identified with despotic forms of rule, carried forward from the history of political thought, and group psychology introduced as a means of understanding the relationship between utopia and dystopia. Andrew Norton-Schwartzbard noted that "written many centuries before the concept 'dystopia' existed, Dante's Inferno in fact includes most of the typical characteristics associated with this genre--even if placed in a religious framework rather than in the future of the mundane world, as modern dystopia tends to be." 

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