Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Beyond Sanctioned Activism in Carl Hiaasen's "Flush": Sacrifice Zones in Realistic Fiction.

Abstract: CARL HIAASEN'S FLUSH (2005) addresses one of the key issues of our time: environmental degradation. His story offers children opportunities to think about how to act and behave in the face of environmental challenges and serves as an argument against prioritizing capitalism over the environment and humanity (Klein, 2014; Lewis, 2015). Flush is funny and irreverent, and it positions children in complex situations as both agentive and lacking control as they contend with family and environmental problems in the Florida Keys. Current theoretical and media representations of environmentalism advocate for understanding the human side of environmental issues in addition to ecological impacts (Buell, 2009; Garrard, 2004; Heise, 2008; Klein, 2014; Lewis, 2015). Geologists have argued for the declaration of a new Anthropocene epoch due to the clear evidence that humanity has forever altered our planet (Carrington, 2016). Research in children's literature must consider lenses that keep people in the foreground when exploring environmental issues. Researchers and educators must consider what children's books can and should mean for children fighting for their futures.Environmental collapse poses one of the most serious threats to modern life the world has seen. Historic and ongoing disregard for land and human life (Klein, 2014; Lewis, 2015) have led to what are known as "sacrifice zones" (Lerner, 2010)-those people and places impacted by environmental or economic devastation, sacrificed to outside environmental and economic interests. People in sacrifice zones are often unheard or silenced by those not experiencing the effects or living within the zones. Traditionally, people in relatively stable economies, such as many in the United States, understand these zones as far away, removed from their experiences of economic and physical safety. However, with anthropogenic climate change posing increasing challenges to the globe, those living in sacrifice zones are becoming more vocal and visible-spurred by focused activism against indifference to environmental and economic disaster. We see examples of this in the number of nations who agreed to the Paris climate accord in 2015 (Davenport, 2015), and perhaps even more so in the grassroots support for the Indigenous activists at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 (Skalicky & Davey, 2016; Treuer, 2016).The definition of sacrifice zones has become fuzzier as people not traditionally living in these areas begin to recognize that such places and people exist close to home, too. Major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have taken many lives and devastated communities. In 2012, deadly Superstorm Sandy crashed into the global economic capital. In addition, governments continue to sanction infringement on Native lands (e.g., Treuer, 2016), and there is ongoing and continual degradation of urban spaces like Flint, Michigan (e.g., Smith, 2016), and natural spaces like the Gulf of Mexico (e.g., Mouawad, 2010). Those with historic privilege stemming from skin color, economic standing, and geographic locale, among other things, can no longer lean on conventional conceptions of what counts as a sacrifice zone to deny adverse impacts on human lives and the environment both near and far. While experienced differentially across locales, sacrifice zones do not have discrete boundaries; those with historic privilege, too, are living in sacrifice zones.Children's Literature in Sacrifice ZonesPopular today in children's literature, and perhaps even more so in young adult literature, are futuristic tales of dystopian wastelands, stories that spring from either Orwellian fears, as in Piers Torday's The Last Wild (2013), or government collapse, as in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993). Hammer (2010) describes such dystopian stories as a means of confronting ecological futures; disaster fiction and refugee journeys of a future society offer not so fantastical voyages that create cultural pressure and imagined futures for young readers. …

Between Utopia and Dystopia: Contemporary Art and Its Conflicting Representations of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract: This paper investigates how different artistic practices interpret and represent scientific thought in general and genetics in particular. By revising the artworks of three different artists, here we demonstrate that those pertaining to the artistic practices closely associated with the Art, Science and Technology artworld (AST), with its subgenres such as computer or bio art, not only understand science differently than its artistic peers but also represent it in a very particular and positive way. This, we argue, contrasts with the larger artistic field and is the result of this art world particular historical development. We conclude that AST’s popularity, despite struggling to assert itself in the artistic field, reflects a larger popular trend that can be also seen, for example, in the transhumanist movement.

California: The Planet of the Future: The Boom Interview

Abstract: Boom interviews prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson about writing, California, and the future. Topics of discussion include utopian and dystopian visions of the state, the Sierra Nevada and Sacramento Delta, the Orange County of Robinson’s youth, how California’s landscape and environment have informed science fiction, terraforming, utopia, dystopia, and finding a balance between technology and environmentalism.

The Utopian Dimension of Kafka's “In The Penal Colony”

Abstract: “In the Penal Colony” incorporates the dilemma of Utopia expressed in a continuum from the Utopian spiritual longing to its material Dystopian realization and the Anti-Utopian attempt to retreat from it. The spatial and temporal background of the story is portrayed as a movement from centrality and timelessness (Utopian) to peripherness and sequential time (Dystopian and Anti-Utopian). The spiritually closed, homogeneous, and coherent Utopian world of the Old Commandant turns into Dystopian nightmare while being implemented by the machine and leads to a retreat to the Anti-Utopian world of the colony. The “stranger,” the “guide” and the “common member,” representative figures of the Utopian genre, are projected into a Kafkaesque world as characterised by the stranger, explorer, officer, condemned man and soldier. Kafka's unique clustering of figures emphasises the Utopian dilemma. A feeling of anguish is expressed in the description of three meaningful moments of “silence,” placed at significant points within the structure and expressing the experience of “… guilt (that) is never to be doubted” in the Penal Colony.

Introduction: The Desire Called Postcolonial Science Fiction

Abstract: In his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz has his tragic protagonist, the son of Dominican immigrants living in New Jersey and an aspiring writer of science fiction (SF) and fantasy, pose an arresting analogy — startling in its frank, unqualified delivery — between the traditionally Euro-American genre of SF and the political and cultural realities of the Caribbean: “[Oscar] was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?”1 A wealth of political, cultural, and aesthetic claims is advanced in this peculiar juxtaposition. For how can the “underdeveloped” nations of the postcolonial Caribbean be said to recall in any reasonable sense the quicksilver lozenges, crystalline skyscapes, or, indeed, even the gutted, post-industrial, dystopian wastelands of canonical SF? The book that follows is, in short, an attempt to explore the conditions, both political and aesthetic, that make possible Diaz’s unqualified comparison of the seemingly incongruous and even incommensurable domains of the postcolonial third world and the genre of SF, particularly as expressed in the recent phenomenon of visionary SF narratives originating in these “marginal” national cultures.