Dystopian Fiction – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: Dystopia before Dystopia

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the looking-glass world of Samuel Butler’s pioneering anti-utopian novel

When I was an undergraduate English student at Loughborough fifteen years ago, I took an optional second-year module called ‘Other Victorians’. As this title implies, the module was intended as a sort of companion-piece to the core module ‘Victorian Literature’, which covered the canon of Victorian writing. On the one hand, you had George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. On the other, you had Florence Nightingale’s essays, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) would stand firmly in the latter camp containing those ‘other Victorians’. His anti-utopian novel is part science-fiction, part social commentary, part adventure fantasy, part comic satire. Like many experimental Victorian works of literature, it resists easy categorisation. Is it even a dystopian work, a forerunner to Brave New World, We, and Nineteen Eighty-Four?

What Happened to Us? Are we in a Brave New World yet?

In this special guest post, Lyubov Dali offers an analysis of Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World in light of their striking dystopian visions

What is freedom to you? Is it an ability to choose what degree to pursue, where to live, what to have for dinner, or is it that hip Pharrell tune? Would limiting these freedoms make you unhappy? More importantly, are you likely to ever be persuaded to volunteer your freedom, aspirations, identity to be sacrificed for the greater social good? Now before you dismiss us as lunatics, you might be surprised to learn that there were literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who not so long ago willingly sacrificed their freedoms for the promise of a better society. Can it happen to us?

Brace yourself to hear not one, but two such stories: one of a society whose existence was shaped by an authoritarian regime, another – of a society that we are at risk to be building now. We will call on to two dystopian (of course!) authors who produced two of the most consequential dystopian works: a Russian Evgeniy Zamyatin and an English Aldous Huxley.

Dante Among the Machines: Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Land of Darkness’

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers a curious dystopian story by Queen Victoria’s favourite novelist

The terms ‘dystopian’ and ‘ecology’ both gained currency in the mid-nineteenth century, although ‘dystopia’ has been traced back even earlier. The Victorian era witnessed the emergence of a new genre of science fiction, dystopian literature, which would produce several classic novels of the twentieth century. Victorian writers used this new genre to fashion responses to the dramatic social and technological changes they were living through, chiefly the discovery of Darwinian evolution and the rise of industrialisation in the period.

The changing landscape of Victorian Britain played an important part in how authors of early dystopian works addressed questions about what we now call ‘the environment’: in both Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the crowded smoggy metropolis of contemporary London was refigured in some future age as a wild garden, following some dramatic alteration in the world’s climate.

Five Fascinating Facts about Dystopian Fiction

Interesting facts about dystopian novels and the history of the genre

In a previous post, we recommended 10 of the best early dystopian novels and offered some insight into how they came about. This might be considered a follow-up post to that earlier one, offering a brief history of dystopian fiction in five interesting facts.

1. The word ‘dystopia’ is older than you might think – but then, so is the genre. The word ‘dystopia’ has been traced back to 1747, where it appears as ‘dustopia’, but is clearly being used with the same meaning as the modern ‘dystopia’. Although dystopian fiction itself is sometimes said to have begun with the 1908 Jack London novel The Iron Heel, there are several Victorian novels which qualify as dystopian fiction, at least of sorts. One of these is Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon – the title, almost the word ‘nowhere’ backwards, explicitly signals its intention to reverse the idea of utopia (which literally means ‘no-place’) – in which Butler satirises the imaginary utopian world he depicts.

Five Fascinating Facts about The Maze Runner

Interesting Maze Runner facts: James Dashner’s a-mazing series of dystopian novels

1. Although some fans have made comparisons between The Maze Runner and other recent young adult dystopian novels, the idea for the series came to its author some ten years ago. Many readers and moviegoers have noted the superficial similarities between The Maze Runner (Maze Runner Series) and the most successful dystopian series of the last decade, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. (We’ve offered some interesting Hunger Games facts in an earlier post.) Dashner has discussed the book’s genesis, which dates back to November 2005: ‘I went to bed, and somehow this idea popped in my head about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable Maze full of hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world. It would be an experiment, to study their minds. Terrible things would be done to them. Awful things. Completely hopeless. Until the victims turn everything on its head.’ The first novel, which establishes the world in which several further books are also set, is a cleverly plotted page-turner (Dashner is not afraid to draw on the cliffhanger device at the end of his brief, action-packed chapters), and the film adaptation garnered largely positive reviews.