Dystopia Revisited

I’ve been on a trip to the land of Dystopia, wandering down a few of its many side roads, re-reading standard works and discovering unfamiliar ones. It was a refreshing exercise to read several of the classics of this genre in sequence over a limited period of time. The production of worthy dystopian novels and stories numbers in the hundreds and continues each year. I offer here a brief survey of some classics of the genre, for your consideration.

To begin with, certain themes recur in dystopia land, including: the status of the intellectual and the free thinking person; the various futuristic visions of architecture or ruin; the social norms, living conditions and personal interrelationships; and the inevitable divisions of society into the powerful and the less-powerful classes. These plot nuances are often a product of an author’s attempt to interject political and social views based on contemporary society. These all become recognizable markers for the reader’s journey through the genre. Also, there is a post-apocalyptic nature to many plots, whether clearly stated or implied. In fact, there seems to be a friendly rivalry in literati circles with the “true” dystopians on one side, the post-apocalyptics on the other.

I started my tour with H.G. Wells. Being one of the ‘fathers of science fiction’, Wells has some claim to writing one of the first dystopian novels, The Time Machine, in 1895. The concept of time travel was not invented by Wells, but he infused the Time Traveller’s journey into the very distant future with a glimpse of a civilization evolved into a divided two class structure. The Time Machine is written in the form of a second hand narrator relating the exploits of the Time Traveller who invents the machine which makes travel to the future and past possible. This plot line is not generally followed in other dystopian works as most are straightforward narratives assuming place, time, and events to be cohesive in their telling. But Wells uses this format in some of his other tales, most notably in When the Sleeper Awakes.

Most of the standard elements of dystopian fiction are present in The Time Machine. The architecture plays a prominent role, with the landscape dotted with ruined buildings and monuments, and an underground network of cavernous tunnels. The societal structure is based on power where the underground species has evolved as strong, brutish, and animal-like, but in control of the apparatus of the world, preying on the gentle, simple minded surface civilization for sustenance.

The Time Machine continues to fascinate readers, viewers and listeners. It has been filmed several times, most recently in 2002, was performed as a radio dramatization by the BBC in 2009, and Penguin Classics has released a new paperback series of Wells’ novels. The Time Machine was first published in serialization and stands as an example of Wells’ early writing in the genre, as the first popularization of the time travel concept, and as a clue to themes to be developed in his later work.

Wells’ When the Sleeper Awakes, 1899, (revised in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes) is a more intense dystopian offering covering the full range of themes, but also written from the perspective of a visitor from the past finding himself in the future. Graham, “The Sleeper”, wakes after a 200 year nap to find himself in a future London. By a rather convoluted sequence of events, he is now the richest man in the world. The plot basically involves Graham assuming his “responsibility” as the master of the world and aligning with the enlightened visionaries to thwart the evil power elite.

Wells did some intriguing writing here regarding futuristic architecture in particular, with London depicted as a giant covered mall with massive halls, passageways, factories, living quarters, and entertainment centers. He returns to the theme of the underground masses versus the above ground society. His vision of airplanes and aerodromes add to the prophetic nature of the writing. More solidly dystopian than The Time Machine, some readers see Sleeper as a logical ‘fleshing out’ of the ideas briefly explored in the previous novel, and many critics have termed Sleeper “the first dystopian novel”.

Wells was a socialist, wrote fiction and non-fiction, and was concerned with society’s structure, its problems, and its future. His early works were termed “scientific romances”,
many of which were concerned with the utopian possibilities for the “World State”. He envisioned an end to nationalism and the advancement of science and a planned society. Reading these two works of Wells is an exercise in theme development. Written just four years apart, Sleeper is a giant leap from The Time Machine in terms of dystopian elements and development of plot. The later and more seriously regarded dystopians such as Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell owe a great debt to Wells’ imagination.

One of the first works I revisited was the short story “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, published in 1909. This can be found in Forster’s volume of short stories titled The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. It tells the tale of a future dependent on “The Machine” to control the personal and public affairs of the citizenry. The dependency has allowed ‘humans’ to evolve into a soft culture where the basic state of living is isolation in small apartments, and the main concern is communication of ideas. This is accomplished in a huge subterranean metropolis or ‘condominium’ environment where the Machine provides the essential needs of the citizens, and provides the means of communication and learning through video conferencing. Travel to the outside world is prohibited, but one is permitted to use an air ship to be transported to other similar subterranean locations on the Earth. The inevitable happens when gradually the Machine develops problems, begins to falter, and then stops altogether. There are definite post-apocalyptic hints to the plot, especially concerning the surface world and the possibility of life existing there.

Clearly dystopian in nature, most readers today readily identify the Machine with our computer driven society, easily bringing to mind our apprehension at the turn of the millennium, when airplanes would fall from the sky and the infrastructure of the globe would shut down. But this story was written a hundred years ago, seventy years before the internet, and was most probably a reaction of sorts to Wells’ writings as well as a statement of concern with the development of technology in general. No matter how conceived, "The Machine Stops" is staggering in its prophetic perception of the tendency to devise artificial solutions to human problems and needs, and today’s reliance on computers, systems, video and data transmission underlines the significance of Forster’s warnings. Vonnegut’s Player Piano echoes this theme. "The Machine Stops" should be required reading for all of us.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, written in 1921, has been considered the first dystopian novel of the” modern era”. It is a prototype of sorts for the novels of Huxley and Orwell, the similarities being too obvious to ignore. Here we have the complete scenario of a future society forming after a war that destroyed most of the world’s population. The locale is a glassed-in One State led by the Benefactor with a totally controlled, always visible society. Each minute of life is accounted for, and the plot centers on a rebellious group which favors imagination and individual freedom over order and efficiency. The narrator of the tale, D-503, is the designer of a space ship named The Integral, which is designed to travel the universe to spread the One State philosophy.

Zamyatin was a Bolshevik and experienced the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. He was a naval engineer and writer, and was arrested and exiled at least twice in his lifetime. He became a critic of the Communist government in Russia, mainly because of what he saw as censorship and extreme regimentation. He was also the author of an essay titled "Herbert Wells" and supervised several translations of H.G. Wells’ works. The influence of Wells is clear. George Orwell was clearly influenced by Zamyatin; he read We in the French translation and published a review. Aldous Huxley maintained that he had not known of We until after he had written Brave New World, but most critics, including Orwell, doubted that claim. When asked about the influences on his novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut is quoted as saying that he “cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamyatin’s We.”

Wherever the trail of influences begins and ends, reading Zamyatin’s We is essential to a studious reading of the subsequent novels of the genre. All of the ‘elements’ of dystopian fiction are present, including not so veiled references to Christianity, surgical procedures to eliminate the ‘imagination’, numbers instead of names, the inevitable attraction of the sexes outside of regimented unions, the ‘underground’ revolutionaries, and an intriguing take on architecture involving glass buildings and living quarters. Interestingly for this period of dystopian writing, We includes space travel, or at least the preparation for it, as a background plot device. This is not repeated by Orwell or Huxley, but is featured at the conclusion of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932, eleven years after Zamyatin’s We. Huxley has stated that his decision to write the novel was inspired by his visit to a state of the art chemical plant. His concern with the future of industrial advances, especially genetic engineering, is clearly evident in this novel, where the society of the New World State has transcended natural sexual attraction and birth to substitute engineered and controlled reproduction. At the novel’s start we are included in a tour of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where much pride is taken in the number of fetuses which are able to be produced by a single egg, and the manipulation of these into the various castes of society. Everyone is programmed by birth to be a member of a particular class, bred to occupations, housing, diet, etc., thus eliminating competition and promoting contentment. Life in The New World State has eliminated romantic relationships, idleness, professional competitiveness, religion, and books.

Unlike the closed society described in We, the New World State, centered in ‘London’, includes outlying population centers which are semi-controlled. These are used as tourist diversions and exile destinations. One of these, the so-called Savage Reservation is located in New Mexico, and plays an important role as the plot develops. An exiled mother and son are returned to ‘London’ and their fate, and their interaction with members of the higher castes and the populace forms the scenario for the conclusion of the novel.

The similarities between Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World are significant. They in fact have much more in common than does Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Orwell’s dystopia is a grittier work, the setting of which resembles Eastern Europe under totalitarianism, right down to the grim apartment buildings and dark streets. Here we have government surveillance, information control, rewriting history, a one party structure, mutual distrust, lack of basic freedoms, and the inevitable revolutionary group. We seem to identify more with Winston Smith than any other central character in the previous dystopian novels because he faces what we have been taught to fear in our own society. His occupation is to change and falsify past documents, news items, literature and other records. It’s a small leap for us to recollect the similar activities of the Soviets, such as brushing a Beria or a Khrushchev out of a photo, or removing an enemy of the state from all mention in history books. We are familiar with the real life specter of citizens being spied on, turned over to the Party authorities by neighbors, and locked away convicted of a trumped up political crime.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has transcended literature and entered the zone of common social concepts. We use it and learn from it in ways that are not possible with the others. We recognize its terms and warnings in our present society: Big Brother, doublethink, newspeak, war is peace, love is hate, room 101, thought police, and of course ‘Orwellian’. At times we use these terms too loosely, and at other times we ignore their rightful application. The themes are universal, and that is the special power of this book.

Vonnegut’s Player Piano, 1952, is a treatise on automation and capitalism. It focuses on the replacement of human skilled labor with machines, in this case the pre-computer era punch card operated ‘boxes’. The theory is that humans make mistakes, are slow, and are concerned with other things in their lives, thereby hampering constant attention and focus to the making of products, tools, etc. In fact, most routine chores are susceptible to ‘automation’. The consequence is a population of lower class workers having nothing meaningful to do all day, except to ponder how much better things would be if they were gainfully employed. The resentment of the working class for the elite managers and engineers is intense, and builds to a mini ‘revolution’. Vonnegut has given us a dystopian world much simpler in scope than Zamyatin, Huxley or Orwell, but in many ways a world more directly relevant to modern day work methods and theories of production, all centered on the computer, and the consequences for society of devaluing manual skilled and unskilled labor.

Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960, is an essential book for any reading survey of the dystopian genre. Post-apocalyptic in nature, it covers a period of thousands of years, in three cycles, centering on a Roman Catholic monastery in the United States where the monks have been preserving written documents and artifacts especially of a scientific nature. Miller originally wrote three short stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950’s, and subsequently reworked the stories into a three part novel. Heavily influenced by Roman Catholicism and the Judeo-Christian traditions, the novel can be challenging to readers unfamiliar with religious doctrine and the Bible, however the sheer power of the writing and the plot fully compensate for this.

The cyclical structure of the novel takes us through the aftermath of a nuclear war, the survival of the Church, and in particular the Abbey of St. Leibowitz in the southwestern United States, the preservation of knowledge for future generations, the barbarian existence of the remaining population, and finally the resurgence of scientific and technological knowledge and experiment leading to the certainty of a new desolation. Man’s seemingly endless ability to strive toward self destruction is reaffirmed. Canticle is not to be missed by the first-time traveler to dystopia , and is an even greater pleasure the second or third time around.

Our fascination with these tales of the possible and probable continues, and in many ways grows stronger, in the decades following 1960. There have been many worthy entries in the field of dystopian literature since Miller’s Canticle, and I intend to include them in a future reading project. We remain students of this genre because each work teaches us something different about how human beings react to desolation, control, loneliness, intrusion, security, war, peace, love and hate. These stories shed light on the eternal struggle between our individual needs and desires and those of society. They enunciate our unspoken fears about current events and allow us to question the validity of what we see and hear. They justify our doubts and sharpen our vigilance. They provide warning and comfort, and renew our faith in the human desire for intellectual and physical freedom. They question the very fabric of our governments, our society, our religious institutions, and our history. They challenge us, entertain us, frighten us, and soothe us. And they deserve to be read, and revisited.