What is Dystopian Literature?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a dystopia is
"An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible."
The easiest way to think about Dystopian Literature and dystopias is to consider that a dystopia is often the result of a society's arranging its government and laws around good.
•Six most important elements of Dystopian literature
1) Quickly Establish the Reality. As stated above, dystopian fiction allows for a fairly broad field of representation.
2) Lay Out the “False Utopia”
3) The “Event”
4) The Totalitarian
5) The Resistance
6) The Result
• characteristics of Dystopian literature
1) Government control.
2) Environmental destruction.
3) Technological control.
4) Survival.
5) Loss of individualism.
Rise of Dystopian literature
A modern literary genre, the dystopia, was invented by Yevgeny Zamyatin in his novel 1924 We which could be published only abroad. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, which are modeled on it.
The dystopian genre remained a dark-themed, adult genre, highly reflective of the work of Zamyatin, until the 1980s and 1990s which introduced the idea of dystopia as a young adult genre. Dystopias did not become popular in the young adult genre until 1993 when Lois Lowry released The Giver.
Utopia vs. Dystopia
“utopia” is a society or community setting wherein the people experience the ideal and most perfect life possible. By contrast, “dystopia” highlights the complete opposite, which is a place of extremely unpleasant living and working conditions for most people.
is often described as the first dystopian novel, but there are precedents in Western literature. HG Wells, with whom Zamyatin had several meetings when Wells visited the Soviet Union in 1920 and on whose work he wrote a long essay, produced some powerful dystopias alongside utopian fiction and non-fiction.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny
Ivanovich Zamyatin, sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. Despite being the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik.
19th century's Dystopian literature
The Time Machine by H.G.Wells
Recent Dystopian works are
The Road by John Hillcoat
This survival story follows a man and his son traveling the vast nothingness of a post-apocalyptic world, where a global cataclysm had triggered an extinction event, followed by the total collapse of our civilization. This is probably the worst kind of dystopia, one where there is no society left. When facing starvation, the few people still alive resort to ‘less-civilized’ survival methods.
The epic conclusion of the new “Planet of the Apes” trilogy represents a very rare situation where the last film in the series is the best. This post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi dystopia is spiced up by an incredible mix of revenge, survival, and war.
Sci-fi Science Fiction
Science fiction is a film genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar travel or other technologies.
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