I have a very unsettling feeling inside me about the future of fiction. I deeply appreciate works of the past that use the idea of creating a new reality, because fiction often reveals what is true and important about our real world. Dystopia is the highlight of fiction for me, as it is designed precisely to reveal deeper fears people carry in this reality — a tool to create a story through narrative parallels. The theme itself is useful in illustrating how our world can spiral into a new direction — it engages us to contemplate our consciousness and worries. I fear, however, that if we don’t capture the spirit of our time creatively, this genre will simply drown in repetitiveness in the absence of new imaginations.
It is lamentable how in recent years’ movies, especially those made by big studios with enormous budgets, have become unimaginative, repetitive and stagnant — the same comic book universes or action franchises, similar soundtracks with a few changed notes and characters that have not been reimagined through new perspectives in ages. These are problems seen across cinema and TV, and this great problem of creative stagnation is seeping into fiction as well. When it comes to the dystopian theme, the same problem manifests itself mainly in the way plot lines and settings are created. It almost feels as if the word “dystopia” is associated in the head of every screenwriter and producer with the same gritty, gray and cold world full of blown-up buildings and mushroom clouds.
This becomes a problem when people are asked about what they think of dystopian literature too. There is “1984,” “Brave New World,” maybe “The Handmaid’s Tale” … and that’s it. All of these books were written in the past century, and they were all written to talk about fears that are not our own because their historical context no longer portrays our reality. Our fears and concerns in this century are shaped by culture, history and politics that are much more dynamic, complicated and fragile than ever before — dystopian art must rediscover its purpose by imagining ways to tell stories about our new fears.
In terms of where we can start from, I believe the best place is the life of an individual in the modern world. Social media for example has become infamous for being the root cause of political polarization, loneliness, isolation and other problems, yet I cannot think of a single book or movie made in the past 15 years that can actually scare me into thinking about where the world is headed. Try imagining our world, pushing the fast-forward button for a couple decades and see where we’d end up — nobody knows what a fictional world mired in the problems of today dialed up to 11 would look like, and that’s exactly why we should try writing stories with our present imagination to see where we can end up as a society.
Another more complicated yet vital way is observing the concerns of our collective society and using that as a starting point. We are afraid of nuclear war not, for example, in the same way it is shown in “Dr. Strangelove” with dark rooms and bombers, but rather with the brinkmanship of incompetent leaders losing a sense of danger. We are afraid of mass poverty and the impact of technology not in the way it is shown in a movie like “9” with bombed cities and sentient dolls, but because we fear that a jobless society will be taken over by an elite class that will reinvent feudalism in the 21st century. The state of the world today should be the prime source of new inspiration to move beyond the legacy of old dystopias.
There is, of course, a bigger obstacle to overcome too — imagining the unimaginable. A quote often attributed to Henry Ford goes, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” and it is important to expand the message from here to the emotion of fear beyond our times. We are afraid of nuclear war, artificial intelligence, climate change, the future of democracy and other things, but is there a glaring issue that we have forgotten entirely? Something perhaps we have overlooked, underestimated or haven’t even coined a word for? Bear in mind that words like “doublespeak,” “metaverse,” “cyberspace” and even the word “utopia” itself were coined by fiction authors to describe a world foreign and strange to our own. Yet, they found their way into public use, so it is always possible for a work of fiction to change reality itself in the long run.
As history proves, there is no reason to think that imagining new ideas out of nothing is inconsequential — there simply must be the motivation inside the author’s heart to think about where the world can head toward. Think about where the world can head not just out of fear, but in some cases, because of fear or even despite fear. The rest is up to your perspective, and I fear that we desperately need new perspectives in the name of creativity.
Deniz Gulay is a sophomore double-majoring in history and Russian.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.