So, Fellow Sophisticates, I'm either suffering from a nasty virus or, like Winston Smith, being slowly crushed down by the weight of a totalitarian regime. And the latter is possible! Yes, The City of Windsor could be just such a fiendish foe. The barren landscape, the lack of culture and individualism, a leadership more intent on the status quo than on productive change...
But possibly it could be a virus.
Yet I've been thinking about this idea of dystopia, and it struck me how pessimistic this genre is, at least as evidenced by its founding fathers. Not only have Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell envisioned these dystopic societies where the individual is buried beneath the mass of the State, but they all, shall we say, end on less than a happy note.
All three create a society where the state overwhelms the individual, where facelessness overshadows individuality. They are almost flawless, these vast structures of manipulation and propaganda. And yet all three writers have set fractures of hope in the blank wall of the state. Individualism, the questing human spirit... there's a sense of resistance, even against what seems an impossible enemy.
Yet in the end that hope is erased, subsumed by the faceless society.
So not only do we have the pessimism of the vision itself, of these dystopic worlds, but the veins of contending possibility are slowly squeezed shut or drained dry. Yes, there's always the possibility that opposition will rise again at some point, and yet will it have any better chance?
The pessimism of it struck me. Yet that is likely part of the didactic nature of these stories: the story as warning, as an omen of the future. And products of their times, too, most likely, created as they were in the time of the Great Wars. Faith in humanity, and human progress, had been dimmed. A sense of fear pervades these novels... and a sense of just retribution, as well. We, as a whole, deserve no more than these fates presented to us.
It strikes me that this is part of the driving force of the genre. Much of the generative power comes from this sense of pessimism. What do you think? Do dystopias arise out of our frustration with what we see around us?
And have things changed? What are some great modern dystopias if I want to continue my reading? And is there hope? A little optimism? Can the human spirit survive the dystopic future?
I'd love some recommendations. I've heard some great things about Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Any thoughts? Any others?