Opinion

Dystopian novels plague shelves, reflect real-life possibilities

On March 20, the second film in the “Divergent” trilogy, “Insurgent,” was released in U.S. theaters with about equal success to its predecessor and similar success to the arguable face of the genre, “The Hunger Games.” In fact, ever since the 2008 novel “The Hunger Games” was published, the dystopian genre saw an impressive rise in its number of entries as authors decided to try their hands at one bleak world scenario after another.

Every industry since has been following the band wagon to money, allowing the mind boggling question of why this genre is so popular demand an answer. Simply put, it’s society’s way of fulfilling desires they can’t attain in the real world.

There are many challenges the world faces in these modern times: terrorism, sexism, racism, financial crisis, climate crisis, addictive technological crutches — the list goes on. These stories of strict totalitarian governments that bring the world to seemingly perfect order provide the ideal backdrop for audiences to play a little make believe and insert themselves into the situation.

According to medium.com, “People use television shows, books, news as a means of ‘fictional rehearsal’ or a ‘practice’ of how to potentially deal with similar real-world scenarios … it’s a comforting concept, to know that there’s a worse way to live or something, especially in the recent uncertain economic and political atmosphere.”

With books like “The Hunger Games,” “The Maze Runner” and “Divergent” populating the shelves of young adult novels and drawing in more than just teenage audiences, it gets society thinking about the real-world possibilities presented in these fictional genres. It spurs television shows like “Doomsday Preppers” and “Survivor,” with these shows and ideas giving even more power to the genre.

When asked if these books were affecting society or if society was affecting them, creative writing junior Brett Connors said he feels like it’s both.

“It’s definitely a response to society in the hopes of affecting society, because a lot of what dystopian literature does … it’s akin to satire, so it seems like the goals would be to definitely change some of the things that they blow out of proportion,” Connors said.

For example, climate change seems to be a popular topic in recent dystopian fiction in response to our worrying statistics and facts over the issue. This drove a whole new sub-genre in the genre called “cli-fi,” which is a cute nickname for a slew of books meant to scare people into making a change in their world.

However, the affect, or how people perceive it, cannot always be controlled.

According to an article by Boston Inno, this wave of dystopian fiction in movies and novels may be a sign that society believes world-wide doom is a likely outcome, with “the difference between the storyline of our reality and the fantasy is — we still have time to fix it.”

This would be an example of dystopian literature having a larger effect on society than vice versa. While experts and news outlets are overwhelmingly reporting that climate change is something that can be prevented, the ideas presented from dystopian literature — whether it is to encourage a change in attitude or not — is clouding the rest of society’s judgment and only allowing them to see doom.

This climate change idea of dystopian literature might be harder to swallow because people can’t see themselves realistically changing something so massive and uncontrollable, but they can see themselves affecting something smaller, such as the government.

“I think we always want some sort of big government dystopia,” said creative writing junior Andrew Wilson. “It’s based in youth, and this desire to rage against the machine that is controlling your life.”

Overthrowing a government has been presented in many forms of fiction this past decade, and the reason people like this type of dystopia is because it — even in its bleakest hours — largely only presents armies fighting against armies. War is easy to swallow because humans have been fighting against one another for centuries.

An article from the Huffington Post sums these ideas all up very nicely, saying that “we admire the best dystopian novels because they’re written well and depict people we can relate to. We’re fascinated by the terrible things these characters face, and by how some react bravely and some react cowardly or with resignation.”

For us, a dystopia could happen at any time anywhere, but we like the ideas of these novels and these characters because if we were faced with this terrible situation of corrupt government or all out doom, we would fight — or at the very least survive. This craze will keep fading in and out of time with new problems that crop up in our world, because, as humans, it is in our nature to struggle and overcome.

Opinion columnist Nicollette Greenhouse is a creative writing senior and may be reached at [email protected].

2 Comments

  • A huge passenger ship, called NOT “the ship of fools” but ”The Gaiatania”, and headed for a major methane iceberg and the collision will seal the fate of the human species on this once lovely Earth.

    Looking for a cartoonist to draw this cartoon illustration.!

  • Ms Greehnouse great column ask eds for the email i sent you and RSVP please to danbloom AT gmail and see cli-fi.net re CLI FI backstory

Leave a Comment