What’s The Matter With Dystopia?

This story originally appeared on Public Books

February 1, 2015 — Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power.

If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be as common as parking lots, deadly plagues as widespread as the flu, and cannibalism no more unusual than a visit to McDonald’s. Dozens of writers have delved into the genre over the last decade, from newcomers such as Edan Lepucki (California, 2014) to old hands like Cormac McCarthy (The Road, 2006). Young adult novels in the genre abound, from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–2010) and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (2011–2013) to Lydia Millet’s Pills and Starships (2014). The scenarios stretch from hurricanes that devastate New York City, as in Nathaniel Rich’s eerily prescient Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), to global infestations of genetically engineered species that drive humankind to the edge of starvation, as in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). The fall season of 2014 added a host of new offerings in the genre, including David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Michael Faber’s Book of Strange New Things, and Howard Jacobson’s J.

Dystopia as a literary genre by and large developed in the 20th century, in the shadow of world wars, totalitarianisms, genocides, and looming threats of nuclear war and environmental crisis — with a few earlier exceptions such as Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). Over much of the 20th century, it functioned as a powerful tool of political criticism, from E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). From the crowd of more recent titles, Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl distinguishes itself as a text with similar visionary power, among other things because it looks at the collapse of the current world order from Bangkok rather than New York or London. But many other recent dystopias fall flat even as they continue to sell copies: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future point to some of the reasons why dystopias, far from unsettling their readers, have become familiar and comfortable. Their focus on details of everyday life makes survivalists hard to tell apart from hipsters, their portrayals of apocalypse tend to recycle well-known motifs from earlier science fiction, and their visions of the future serve mostly to reconfirm well-established views of the present.

That Collapse is uncompelling as a piece of fiction does not in principle diminish its value as an attempt to bring environmental science to a broad audience—though it seems doubtful that its dry, wonkish prose serves this purpose well. Nor are Oreskes and Conway the first environmental scientists to use dystopian fiction as a narrative tool. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich used science fiction vignettes in The Population Bomb to drive home the human realities of his demographic projections, only to see himself fiercely attacked for scenarios that did not come true — evidence, in the minds of his critics, that his scientific claims were also mistaken. Oreskes and Conway are aware of this pitfall. As they explain in the accompanying interview, “2093 felt close enough that it was scary, but not so close that the year would come and go within our lifetimes and people would say — see you got that wrong!” Yet they seem unaware that scientific facts and figures in dystopian fiction tend to operate not only or mainly as literal truths, but rather as symbols of narrative urgency: the bigger the predicted disaster, the greater the call to social change. And even though they acknowledge the importance of economics rather than science in the climate change crisis, their book delivers little in the way of an alternative economic vision, and in the end falls back on biotechnology as the solution to the crisis.

Contemporary dystopias, as these examples show, aspire to unsettle the status quo, but by failing to outline a persuasive alternative, they end up reconfirming it. This weak cocktail of critique and complacency may explain the current popularity of “apocaholism,” as biologist Peter Kareiva has called it. Dystopian science fiction seems like a ready-made tool with which to engage current social and environmental crises — but only because it so often recycles worn scenarios from the apocalypses of the past. At this point, postapocalyptic wastelands have themselves become too reassuringly familiar. Perhaps Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, was right in accusing writers of dystopian fiction a few years ago of being complicit in pervasive social pessimism, and calling on them for new utopian visions. When dystopia becomes routine, science fiction writers have new tasks cut out for them.

Ursula K. Heise is a professor in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture; 2010). She has just finished a book called “Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.” Her website is www.uheise.net.

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