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.

Hassler, Donald M., and Clyde Wilcox, Eds. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction

Abstract: Hassler, Donald M., and Clyde Wilcox, eds. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 362 pp. Cloth. ISBN 978-1-57003-736-8. $44.95. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction is a follow-up companion to 1997's Political Science Fiction, also edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox. Longer than its predecessor, New Boundaries offers twenty-two essays on sf and politics in a volume that "covers the full ten years of politics and of science fiction" since the last book (ix). This may make it sound as if the essays solely address those ten years, yet the coverage of the book is far greater, with contributors covering recent topics--for example, terrorism and the much-maligned politics of the now-defunct Bush administration--and analyzing writers from a variety of eras such as William Blake, Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, Iain M. Banks, and China Mieville. The staples of many sf essay collections are discussed here, including cyberpunk, feminism, and race, as well as specific writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson, but it is very refreshing also to see a place found for newer sf texts such as Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, in addition to less-studied areas such as Latin American works. Hassler and Wilcox have divided New Boundaries into three sections: "On the Personal 'New Man,'" "On Power and the 'Nation,'" and "On Individual Writers and Situations." The first section aims to discuss the potential of the "new mankind" (viii). The essays in the second part include pieces "that evoke the old power centers of competitive empires and nation-states" (ix). The final section considers the division "between the personal and the efficient organization of a systems approach to human affairs" (ix). These categories have considerable crossover, of course, and the relationship between the essays and their categories is not always immediately clear. Ranging from nine to thirty pages, the essays vary in length and approach to their main topics. The depth of these essays also varies, with most pieces offering valuable insights into texts, authors, and theories; a handful of contributions are more general introductions to their topics and therefore will be of greater benefit to newcomers to the genre than to scholars. There are some terrific essays in the collection that address a range of political areas. Highlights include Lisa Yaszek's contribution, a well-written and well-structured standout piece that offers an excellent assessment of post-WWII intersections between technologies and gender. Yaszek follows her discussion of the historical context with an analysis of Judith Merril's sf, arguing that sf offers a good medium for Merril's "progressive [feminist] political ideas" (90). The activities of women at the time in organizations such as Women Strike for Peace, as well as their growing importance in scientific endeavors (Yaszek notes that their participation was credited for the Soviets' early lead in the space race), meant that female protagonists in sf narratives had more credibility: "it seemed the future was wide open and that women might be at home anywhere from the laundry room to the launchpad" (81). Another essay that focuses on a particular time in sf history is Mark Decker's piece on dystopia, which surveys the early twentieth-century political dystopias of E. M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" and Max Nordau's non-fiction study, Degeneration. Decker links these works to the "biomedical imaginary," a concept drawn from other theorists that describes the flawed science arising from the relationship between medical science and fiction, where "the ideas of medical investigators infuse popular discourse just as popular discourse infuses the ideas of medical investigators, and this infusion can have political consequences as medical discourse is popularized and amateur diagnoses of social ills are made" (54). …

Dystopian Transformations and Character Construction in Young Adult Science Fiction Lauren Olivers’ Delirium

Abstract: The present study entitled Dystopian Transformations and Character Construction in Young Adult Science Fiction Lauren Olivers’ Delirium focuses on the issue of dystopian transformations and character construction. The study investigates the main character, Lena; character construction in the novel; and the contribution of character constellations in the construction of Lena’s characterization. The study was conducted within a descriptive text analysis by applying a qualitative method and is framed by theoretical frameworks of narrative theory (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983) and young adult literature science fiction and dystopia (Bradford, Mallan, Stephens & McCallum, 2008). The results demonstrate that Lena’s characterization is constructed through two factors. These factors are the atmosphere of dystopian transformations and constellation characters which give both positive and negative effects to Lena’s characterization. Keywords: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Young Adult Dystopia, Characterization, Narrative Theory, Constellation Character .

“I Was Watching You, Mockingjay”

Abstract: Although they are set in the future, dystopias are very much concerned with the present. At their core, they represent an attempt on the part of writers to use literature as a vehicle to examine contemporary social and political issues that could, if left unattended, bring about undesirable consequences for people. Dystopian narratives are not diametrically opposed to utopian literature.

Three World Paradigms for SF: Asimov, Yefremov, Lem

Abstract: The best works of SF have long since ceased to be crude adventure studded with futuristic gadgets, whether of the ‘space opera’ or horror-fantasy variety. If SF is (as posited in MOSF) a literary genre of its own, whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the interaction of estrangement (Verfremdung, ostranenie, distanciation) and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the dominant motions about the implied addressee’s empirical environment, then such a genre has a span from the romans scientifiques of Jules Verne to the social-science­fiction of classical utopias and dystopias. Its tradition is as old as literature — as the marvellous countries and beings in tribal tales, Gilgamesh or Lucian — but the central figure in its modern renaissance is H. G. Wells. His international fame, kept at least as alive in Mitteleuropa and Soviet Russia as in English-speaking countries, has done very much to unify SF into a coherent international genre. Yet, no doubt, these three major cultural contexts — discussed in this essay — their traditions and not always parallel development in our century, have also given rise to somewhat diverging profiles or paradigms for SF. I shall here briefly explore those paradigms in the most significant segment of post-Wellsian SF development, that after the Second World War.

Black Mirror and the Divergence of Online and Offline Behavior Patterns

Abstract: This essay seeks to show the divergence of real and virtual communication codes by means of analyzing Charlie Brooker’s dystopian series Black Mirror, in respect of the influence of new communication technologies and gadgets in the form of bodily extensions. It draws on both recent sociopolitical phenomena and sociological findings to undermine why and how the speculative fiction of Black Mirror displays the characters’ engagement in their environs as inherently obscene, and at same time mirrors the recent developments that are looming ahead in the future which makes the series prophetical rather than merely dystopian in its outlook.