Did Dystopias "Lose Their Teeth?"

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of articles that take swings at the dystopian genre. These have rankled me for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it seems to have become somewhat trendy to disparage dystopias now that women are dominating the genre, but I've seen some valid criticisms, too.

Yes, there's been a surge in the trend of dystopias that categorize people, and that seems have pulled consumers into the fantasy of sorting themselves into those categorizations. You only have to look at some of the marketing ploys around the Hunger Games franchise to see it, where they invited people to join districts and compete. Which, in turn, feeds into the idea that life imitates art; a book that criticizes the media for focusing purely on the romanticized elements and ignoring the horrors was largely promoted through that exact lens.

I'm not going to defend the categorization trend, but I don't think you can scorn it without being a little critical of Brave New World in turn. And that's what's been bothering me.

Not as much has changed in dystopian fiction as some would believe.

There are some fluffy dystopian novels out there now, just as there are always fluffy novels in popular genres. It happens. But at their heart, dystopias are still portraying the ugly reflections of utopias. They're still taking those concepts that, in another species, might serve as a formula for a perfect society. If there's one thing I've learned in all my time as a human, though, it's that we reject perfection far more than we realize. We're rarely content with the status quo, and I once argued that humans could never exist in a utopia because it would require us to give up hope.

And the thing about true dystopias is that they're never really hopeless.

Most of the articles I've seen have been criticizing dystopian fiction for being too bleak and too hopeless. They're not looking at the structures of the dystopians built up in these novels, though. Instead, they're just complaining that authors are continuously choosing to write in this genre.

There's this sense of "being and doing better" that these articles are clamoring for, all while claiming that dystopias were somehow better in the past than they are now. This grates on me because they always end up citing 1984 and Brave New World. (Never We, though... which predated both.) While those are important books, I find it funny how they're held up as the pinnacles of what dystopias should be when they are, in fact, far more anti-utopian than dystopian.

Bear with me here.

Anti-utopias are the bleak, hopeless, don't-bother-resisting-you'll-just-get-crushed novels. 1984 is a prime example. Dystopias, on the other hand, leave room for hope. They warn us against becoming complicit in societies that may benefit some, but crush others. They stress the power of a single individual to change everything, simply by daring to question the world they live in. These are your Hunger Games, your Xenogenesis series, your Ender's Game, your Dispossessed. They show bleak worlds, but they always invite the reader to see how things can change. And yes, there's always a struggle, and yes, it's rarely easy, but no, it's never, truly, hopeless.

I think dystopias are a very important part of fiction. Sure, they're going through the upward swing of a trend, and I'm sure their popularity will fall off, but for right now, I don't think it's such a terrible thing to see books that show us how, even in the darkest times, things can still change.

It always comes down to what one person can do.

And I think that's wonderful.