2 books

Dystopian Fiction

Dystopian fiction imagines futures — or alternate presents — in which social, technological, or political forces have taken a turn toward catastrophe. The genre begins with H. G. Wells in the 1890s, accelerates through the political anxieties of the twentieth century, and continues to be one of the most commercially and artistically vital genres in literature.

Dystopian fiction is prophetic in the way that good speculative thought is always prophetic: it does not predict the future but clarifies the present by following its logic to a conclusion. The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) established all the major conventions of the genre.

• ›A recognisable world taken to a logical extreme
• ›Social stratification or technological control as central horror
• ›The individual protagonist against a system
• ›A critique of present conditions through displacement into the future