Wired. Ready Player One: we are surprisingly close to realising just such a VR dystopia. I was fortunate enough to catch a preview screening of Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s futuristic novel.
It blew me away. What really caught my attention wasn’t just the awesome references to 1980s pop culture, or the mind-blowing set pieces. It was also the sub-text of the philosophical and cultural impact of gaming and related technologies. It’s Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, and we’re just living in it. Welcome to Atwood's dystopia: plague, pigoons and pleeblands. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood McClelland & Stewart, Story continues below advertisement 378 pages, $37.99 If any writer can project the voice of a prophet presaging certain doom, it is the incomparable word-mistress of Canada, Margaret Atwood.
Atwood's astringent rendition of human frailty, her astute engagement with both science and art, make for a writing intelligence that wastes no time looking at itself in the mirror. Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia. Some of her most perceptive readers have taken this approach.
The novelist Francine Prose, reviewing “Alias Grace,” noted that “Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas.” At its best, Atwood’s fiction summons an intricate social world, whether it be a disquieting vision of the future, as in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or a vividly rendered past, as in “Alias Grace” or “The Blind Assassin”—a genre-bending tour de force set partly in small-town Canada in the nineteen-twenties, for which Atwood won the Booker Prize, in 2000. Like her Victorian forebears, Atwood does not shy away from the idea that the novel is a place to explore questions of morality. “You came to visit,” Clarkson said. “And you were painting your fingernails a beautiful shade of red,” Atwood continued. A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction. Here are the plots of some new dystopian novels, set in the near future.
The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from orbit, leaches the last nourishment the earth has to give, leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals, through some kind of instant mutation or super-quick evolution, but there is a lot of sex anyway, since it’s become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do.
There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the satellite has been trying to create them by torturing women from the earth’s surface. (“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power,” the novel’s narrator says.) Dystopias follow utopias the way thunder follows lightning. Dystopian Fiction’s Popularity Is a Warning Sign for the Future. The Real Reason Dystopian Fiction Is Roaring Back.
From the “everything old is new again” files: Bygone dystopian fiction is officially back in vogue.
As reported last month, Penguin Random House has seen a 9,500 percent sales increase for George Orwell’s 1984 since Trump’s inauguration; that was enough to propel the book to the top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list. The publisher also saw enough demand for It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 satirical novel about an authoritarian president, to reissue a paperback edition in December—and then double down with a robust second print run in January. Nor is this newfound popularity a reflection of blue-state tastes. At Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas, general manager Ben Rybeck says copies of 1984 and other titles are “flying” off the shelves. Iconoclast Books in Ketchum, Idaho sold eight copies of 1984 in January—compared to one in January 2016. Why Do We Like Dystopian Novels? War.
Death. Despair. Oppression. Environmental ruin. Yup, when it comes to demoralizing literature, dystopian novels have it all! For one thing, we’re reading about rather than actually living through the bad stuff happening in the near or far future (though that bad stuff is often an extrapolation of our troubled current world). How to Tell If You’re Living In a Dystopia — And Why It Matters. Ranking 40 Dystopias by Their Livability. Ah, the dystopian future—where would science fiction be without you?
Settings where progress went wrong, where society turned against its own inhabitants, simply provides a more fertile ground for storytelling than futures where everything worked out more or less hunky-dory. Nobody wants to read about a future society with awesome free healthcare and excellent school systems and ecological preservation. We want our totalitarian regimes and bizarre classicism and possibly some mutants. Just look at the proliferation of YA fiction with practically indistinguishable arcs and settings in the last decade—from The Hunger Games to Divergent to The Maze Runner, they’re all milking that sweet dystopian teat to tell teenage romance stories set against ill-explained sci-fi backgrounds.