No Escape
It’s no secret that a lot of books in this dystopian genre are YA novels. Something about the teen experience and imagining the whole world being destroyed are compatible. The struggle of becoming who you are aligns with a sort of catharsis found in these texts. There’s certainly, I imagine, an older demographic that reads apocalypses for relief too - a “See? things could be worse” escape from the existential pain we all feel.
However, as the years go on for me (and I’ve had several decades’ worth) I’m finding these narratives hit different. A greater awareness of my own privilege, plus Margaret Atwood schooling us that “nothing went into it (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985) that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time”, now means I have a slantwise view at my chosen seam of dystopian fiction. Reading with a less cathartic, “glad that hasn’t happened” and more of a sense of foreboding “where is this happening or when will it happen”. Below I will show how certain dystopian novels, all published relatively recently, are excellent examples of this kind of prescient, spine-tingling writing.
I can’t tell you why I enjoy the genre so much, still. Perhaps it triggers a kind of pre-mortum - the desire to understand how you will react when it comes for you. Because it will come for you. Probably. We all crave safety and if you read it in fiction you can say “at least it’s just a story”.
Just picking a few of the dystopian themes either coming our way or that are very much already here:
Social media and the myth of privacy
Deep misogyny and the impact on freedom and rights of women
Irreversible climate change
Let’s have a look one by one at these themes and the novels they appear in.
Social media and the myth of privacy
The Circle by David Eggers, now a film, follows the progression of new social network employee Mae as she lands the job of a lifetime with tech giant The Circle. As she completes her orientation (read: indoctrination) she partakes in a company initiative that challenges every concept of privacy for Mae and the people around her.
On a similar theme, Followers by Megan Angelo tracks the progression of journalist Orla and wannabe celeb Floss. This book explores what happens when we take the idea of the influencer realm as entertainment to one of its logical, and terrifying, conclusions.
Finally The Feed by Nick Clark Windo brings biotech into the conversations around connectedness. Part thriller, part dystopian horror, it like the other two books in this trio asks “what’s the worst that could happen”.
Today, we may avert the disasters imagined by Eggers, Angelo and Clark Windo, but only if we see some sort of anti-online movement begin to take hold. Otherwise could society into the always-on surveillance dystopia imagined years ago by Ben Elton in Blind Faith? If you’re not wholly open, all of the time, what are you hiding? Where, through deepfakes and disinformation, reality is always questioned. So the only choice is radical transparency. You’ll find me off grid, thanks very much.
Deep misogyny and the impact on freedom and rights of women
When it comes to discourse about women and misogyny, The Overton window feels like it’s reversing along the X axis, uncovering views we thought well covered with time and progress. Specifically when it comes to women’s voices (or silencing of them) and controlling women (what we say, do, wear - our bodies).
In Laura Bate’s terrifying 2021 book Men Who Hate Women the Everyday Sexism founder details the reaches of the manosphere, an extremely online collection of various male groups from incels to men’s right activists and the way their deeply misogynistic views penetrate society. The book shows that this is far from a fringe group with little influence, rather that the hatred of women goes all the way to the top. Presidential candidates can be heard on audio bragging how they “grab them [women] by the pussy” and still be elected mere weeks later. I started writing this section a few months back (I’m busy with work, it all takes a while) and since then in the US, there is draft ruling to overturn Roe v Wade, possible reversing 50 years of precedent. This is happening, and I’m not sure why so many of us are surprised.
It is eerie to believe progress can be a protection, a buffer, and then to see it all washed away like a flood breaking a river bank. Modern day protests see people dressed in the handmaid’s uniform as described in Atwood’s 1985 totalitarian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. We should have seen it coming. We didn’t.
Christine Dalcher’s Vox (2018) asks what if half the population were restricted to only speaking 100 words a day. It has a thematic cousin in the Gilead of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale where there the inhabitants also can have no reading materials or writing implements.
And how did this horrifying word restriction come about in the world Dalcher creates?
Somewhere along the line, what was known as the Bible Belt, that swath of Southern states where religion ruled, started expanding. It morphed from belt to corset, covering all but the country’s limbs—the democratic utopias of California, New England, the Pacific Northwest, DC, the southern jurisdictions of Texas and Florida—places so far on the blue end of the spectrum they seemed untouchable. But the corset turned into a full bodysuit, eventually reaching all the way to Hawaii.
And we never saw it coming.
How devastatingly familiar does that sound, now?
Irreversible climate change
I’m spoilt for choice in this category. The cli-fi movement seems to be on the rise. Just like our sea levels.
In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells outlines the various ways in which the several degrees of inevitable planetary warming will cause apocalypses for humans. Flooding and drought, extreme weather events and famine. Mass-displacement as a result and that’s all before you’ve fought the potentially deadly diseases released from the melting ice caps of the artic. It’s not so much depressing as relentlessly terrifying. At one point in the book he congratulates you for reading that far.
Each one of these civilisation-ending scenarios can be found in modern fiction.
In 2022’s How High We Go In The Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu introduces us to a climate plague, discovered (unlocked?) by scientists working in the artic. The impact on life changes everything we know. Somehow there is hope in his narrative, despite all the very real descriptions of loss at scale.
Jessie Greengrass’s 2021 The High House deserves a post on its own for the raw descriptions of how climate-triggered floods can (and will?) actually claim back cities and land. As one review controversially states at the start of the book “The High House managed to shock my system in a way that the attention grabbing antics of Extinction Rebellion have not done.” We’ll let the word “antics” slide here, with a collective eye roll, but the point is right. Fiction can shock us, wake us, terrify us, change us.
If cli-fi can drive groups of people out of denial and into action by showing us what we need to avoid, then I hope we’ll be seeing even more of it in years to come. Printed on sustainable, recyclable paper, you’d hope.
What do you think? Have you read a book so on the nose it gives you the shivers? Let us know and happy (?) reading!
