Love and Other Punishments and the Importance of Dystopian Fiction
My new anthology of dystopian stories may be intended as entertainment, but I’ve got a few genuine worries at the back of my mind.
Dystopian science fiction serves a vital function in society. It causes us to stop and question draconian, ill-thought-through, authoritarian social, economic, technological, political, sexual, or religious ideology, by finding comparative points in literature and heeding their warnings. In dystopian fiction, authors try to imagine worst-case scenarios, and in turn, lobbyists try to prevent them from ever coming to pass.
Don’t believe me? How many times have pressure groups pushed back against freedom curtailing surveillance with claims that the legislation is “Orwellian”? In recent US news, we often see protestors don the garb from The Handmaid’s Tale to warn against a potential anti-feminist theocracy. Key dystopian texts — from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — have all played parts in making people, including political leaders, think twice.