After reading The Hunger Games and Shades of Grey, I started thinking about my love of dystopian fiction. Why is it that I like to read about future humans in peril? I'm not even a big fan of dystopian movies but books, I like. I decided to pose the question on Twitter and received a variety of answers as to why others like it. For some, it's a vicarious thrill, others it's about contemplating the true nature of mankind in extreme circumstances.
For myself, it's curiosity. Just how bad can things get? and Boy am I glad I live here now.
According to Wikipedia a dystopia is "the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence and/or terror, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain."
Sounds like a barrel of laughs, doesn't it? And yet, these are the novels that make me think, that get my heart pounding, that keep me up all night.
In most of these stories, the suffering and the pain in the future are because we screwed up right now. The author tends to point a crooked finger our way because we let it happen. Even if it's fiction, that always makes me feel a bit squirmy. I can't see the future but it's the what ifs that get to me. Sometimes the author comes right out tells us how it all went to hell and in others we have to figure out what it was. These are the most entertaining. I try to piece together how things got to that point. In Shades of Grey, the Collective calls it Something That Happened. What happened? They don't know...something. Something that changed everything.
Even though things seem hopeless, the reader wants things to work out, often they don't- for the protagonist. Hopefully the author gives us a sense that in the future another Something That Happened will happen to straighten it all out. That the oppressed will find freedom and that humankind can find happiness again.
Here is a list of my favorite dysopian novels that I've read so far:
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
- The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde