"... people who can edit out the very details that have most preoccupied the person who made them up, and read for the story alone. The stories, boiled down, are usually at bottom just the good old stories...."
For the writer, besides the fun of getting things off his chest, the pleasure must be in his own ingenuity, the inner consistency of the world he’s worked out, forecasting the logical evolutions of present conditions, making up the new names (B-Mor for Baltimore), finding the clever equivalences. A pitfall of dystopian novels is that their writers can become too absorbed in the details of their invented worlds, and in the inner consistency of their visions, which can produce long, perhaps, to some, uninteresting descriptions....
Long, uninteresting description omitted.
There’s an inherent difficulty in sharing someone else’s imaginary land: the farther it departs from what the reader knows, no matter how vividly described, the less telling it is....
If the wellsprings of novel-writing are mysterious, there’s surely a hint of admonition, and an admonitory project is especially clear in dystopia. A question is: Why write in an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone?
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DYSTOPIAN: Thank you for a new word for my understanding.
Slightly off topic, but notice that the apocalyptic SF novels in the 50's - 70's were either nuclear war or some environmental catastrophe. Now they are mostly about the zombie apocalypse. Not that I'm complaining, I love Word War Z (novel) and I faithfully watch the Walking Dead. One can make similar points on what makes a good novel, the writer can't spend their whole time on world building, what happens to the characters in that world is just as important. I believe that's what makes the Walking Dead so successful - one becomes invested in the characters (plus flesh eating zombies doesn't hurt either).
From the article: Finally, it may also be said that dystopic novels are probably more interesting the younger you are...
This may be true. An astonishing number of the modern science fiction books my older kids are reading are dystopic concoctions.
Some are better than others. The worst are those where the "straight from today's headlines" borrowings are so tediously unimaginative as to curdle the milk of the entire book with acid.
The kids don't listen to NPR so they can skim over this indigestible cheese without even knowing they are doing it.
Crazy Street Corner Guy Off His Meds Says:
Harvey Keitel says there is an inherent difficulty for others to understand him: they want to pretend that he doesn't exist, couldn't exist, that raw naked Want is no longer part of the society that walks past our corner in springtime skirts and springtime shorts, they wish to pretend they are safe from his eye and safe from his thoughts. They do not see the Wasteland that he so clearly sees, they do not sleep in the dirty alley and punch holes through brick walls and bellow shirtless at the moon. This world full of animated carcasses: they must stay unaware or they would fall to their knees asking Harvey to savage them and free their inner rabbits. They do not believe in their inner rabbits, and this makes Harvey despise them with all the bile he can summon. Harvey Keitel has a lot of bile, and Bile is Freedom.
The review is pedantic and a bit condescending, but then, the novel, as described, sounds fairly rote. If this is so, and not indicative of the reviewer's not apparently favorable reaction to the novel, it may be due to the writer's lack of grounding in the science fiction genre. Dystopias are quite common in sf, and, too often, writers unfamiliar with the "canon," as it were, produce stories that are replete with situations or speculations they believe are quite novel but that have long ago become stale. Margaret Atwood's ORYX AND CRAKE trilogy, of which I've read the first two so far, is quite good, a testament either to her knowledge of the genre, or her own imaginative fecundity, or both.
The best dystopias are less predictions of the world to come--though they may be that--than they are refractions of the world as it is.
Crazy Street Corner Guy Off His Meds Says:
The girls in their springtime skirts and their springtime shorts walk past Harvey Keitel and it is as if they don't even see him, yet they see me and avert their eyes. I fear that I will be blamed for all that Harvey has done, that it will be me that faces the Reckoning. This world needs sacrifices to hide The Shame, The Shame is all that drives them, The Shame becomes The Fear and The Judgement. Harvey Keitel has no shame.
For a truly disturbing look at dystopian fiction, read Cormac McCarthy's, "The Road".
Yes, THE ROAD is a notably grim and effective dystopia, not least because it is so possible and easily accepted. Its closing paragraphs brought me to tears--unprecedented for me in any reading experience, (though it has happened when I've watched movies)--and the mood and my imagining of scenes from the book stayed with me for quite a while.
Especially horrifying are the dystopian novels that were intended as utopian novels, e.g. Walden Two.
Dreams from My Father is my favorite dystopian novel.
Not to be pedantic, but The Road is an apocalyptic novel, not a dystopian novel. But it is a very good book.
...an admonitory project is especially clear in dystopia. A question is: Why write in an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone?
I pretty much agree with that. One exception that rises above the genre, avoiding admonition and presenting a believable and sympathetic picture of a post-apocalyptic, declining world, is George R. Stewart's 1949 novel "Earth Abides."
Other than The Hunger Games, this essay seems to assume that all dystopian sf worth reading is written by literary novelists, and that nobody really likes the skiffy bits. Seriously?
Smilin' Jack said...
Especially horrifying are the dystopian novels that were intended as utopian novels...
Especially horrifying is when a dystopian novel is mistaken for a how-to book.
*shrugs*
But anyway, it's a much better essay about sf than you usually get from this particular source, although I usually never can even remember the characters in a dystopian book. The dystopia is the character. If the characters are all that important, it becomes an adventure sf book in a dystopian setting.
Oh, and Earth Abides sucks, especially since you hate everyone, and complaining about the plotholes is more fun than reading it.
Some will say that Game of Thrones is more fantasy than dystopian, but I would make the case that it's actually a dystopian historical novel. It's pretty cool, in my estimation, the way Arthurian figures, Caligula, Genghis Khan, Lucretia Borgia, and zombies get to mingle and each in their way contribute to a dystopian civilization.
mccullough...
Yes! THE ROAD is an apocalyptic novel, an after-the-doomsday story and not a dystopia. You are correct, sir!
I have EARTH ABIDES at home, but I've never read it. I'll have to get to it.
Why write in an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone?
For many authors, "hectoring tone" is a feature, not a bug.
The big development in science fiction that matured it as a genre was the move from explicitly describing the invented world in an elaborate infodump—a technique inherited from utopian fiction—to hinting at the invented world and letting the reader (or, now, viewer) figure it out. Rudyard Kipling was an early practitioner of indirect exposition in his two science fiction stories, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as A.B.C."—which his contemporaries H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't really pick up on—but it was John W. Campbell who made it standard practice after he took over the editorship of Astounding Science Fiction.
Robert,
For another taste from the same era, try "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank.
Of course the writer is correct. That's why no one gives a fig about Game of Thrones, either on the tube or in print.
Is Atlas Shrugged considered a dystopian novel?
mccullough said...
Is Atlas Shrugged considered a dystopian novel?
It made Wikipedia's list
I got interested in utopian novels while in high school, such as Looking Backward and Erewhon. Then I got into the great dystopian novels, like 1984 and Brave New World.
In college, in a course on urban planning issues, I discovered that a lot of the late 19th/early 20th century urban planners were really utopians: They wanted to change and perfect the way people lived, for example by putting everyone into high-rise tower apartments, surrounded by large parks. The conclusion I came to was that the utopias always made things worse, i.e., they became dystopias, but if you took a little piece of the plan, like putting a park with playgrounds near the downtown residential areas, you could make people's lives marginally better.
This is a synecdoche for conservatism v. liberalism/leftism.
Why write in an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone?
The premise is flawed. There are plenty of people out there that love dystopian novels. Just finished one myself. Stirling's "Courts Of The Crimson Kings" which is a dystopian Mars civilization that had it's apex about 20k years before we started farming. Excellent work.
The best of the genre use the dystopian setting like weather. It's just there, elemental. They touch on it enough to set to stage and then let the reader's imagination fill in the blanks. Just like any other fiction genre, nothing should get in the way of creating bonds with the main characters and telling a story.
Yes, THE ROAD is a notably grim and effective dystopia, not least because it is so possible and easily accepted. Its closing paragraphs brought me to tears--unprecedented for me in any reading experience, (though it has happened when I've watched movies)--and the mood and my imagining of scenes from the book stayed with me for quite a while.
RC and I are in complete agreement on this one. The Road will tear a giant, gaping hole in your soul that you'll be a while in mending.
That being said, RC, I would suggest that The Road is not dystopic. It's apocalyptic. There's no crappy society, government, bad services, etc. There simply aren't ANY of those things extant. Nothing is, except the ruins of the pre-event...which the author never details...world.
Not to be pedantic, but The Road is an apocalyptic novel, not a dystopian novel. But it is a very good book
DOH
mccullough beat me to it.
The movie did a fair job adapting the overall story and tone. Teared up watching the ending of that too. My wife chastised me afterwards. "Why did you let me watch that if you knew that was the ending?"
Is Atlas Shrugged considered a dystopian novel?
Pre-dystopic, maybe?
"Robert,
For another taste from the same era, try 'Alas, Babylon' by Pat Frank."
I've never read ALAS, BABYLON, but Pat Frank lived in a small house around the corner from the house my family moved to in Florida in 1963. He died only a year after we arrived in Florida. My dad was a restaurant manager there and he remembered Mr. Frank coming in once or twice. (My dad was a reader of SF and fantasy and was well aware of who Mr. Frank was.)
Every time I would walk or bicycle by that little house I would think of it as "Pat Frank's house," though he was long dead.
"Is Atlas Shrugged considered a dystopian novel?"
It's a masturbation fantasy for its author, (and for her fans).
"Not to be pedantic, but The Road is an apocalyptic novel, not a dystopian novel."
We're splitting hairs here. I guess I was so troubled by the book,and continue to be haunted by it, that I was looking for a chance to bring it up.
In retrospect, my advice is not to read the book. Since I can't get it our of my head. I've never been able to watch the movie, for the same reason.
I've never been able to watch the movie, for the same reason.
I'd suggest it anyone, even given the profound effect the book had on me. If for no other reasons than the technical ones...what it takes to adapt a book into a live-action film.
Plus, if NOTHING else, the performances of the cast were incredible.
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