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.

Science Fiction and the Law: A New Wigmorian Bibliography

Abstract: In 1908, Dean John Henry Wigmore compiled a list of novels that no lawyer could afford to ignore. Wigmore’s list, taken up by Professor Richard Weisberg in the 1970s, catalogs one hundred literary works from Antigone to Native Son, each of which offers insight into the legal system or the practice of law. This article undertakes a similar bibliographic exercise with respect to law and the literature of science fiction. While science fiction, as a literary genre, has its detractors, it cannot be denied that science fiction stories – whether in books, short stories, films or television shows – reach a vast audience and, for better or worse, influence popular perceptions and understanding of science and technology issues. This has been the case since the days of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but is especially true today. When we talk about genetic engineering, Brave New World, Gattaca and Jurassic Park are invariably mentioned. When we think about artificial intelligence, HAL, Skynet and other fictional depictions immediately come to mind. The surveillance society? Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course. These speculative fiction accounts inform the background intuition of judges, legislators and citizens when confronting novel legal issues that arise due to technological change. As such, it is important to understand the body of literature that forms these background intuitions. Accordingly, this article offers the first curated and categorized list of legal science fiction literature, following the model of Wigmore and Weisberg. It is classified according to doctrinal themes, and also includes a compilation of academic literature addressing issues of law in science fiction. It is hoped that the materials compiled here will serve as a useful resource for legal practitioners, policy makers and educators as they grapple with ever increasing legal challenges brought about by the rapid evolution of science and technology. [This is a draft - suggestions, comments and corrections are welcome]

Sleep, disruption and the 'nightmare of total illumination' in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century dystopian fiction.

Abstract: This article addresses the charge that the introduction of the electric light in the late nineteenth century increased disruptions to the human body's biological processes and interfered with the oscillating sleeping-waking cycle. By considering the nineteenth century research into the factors that motivate and disrupt sleep in concert with contemporary discussions of the physiology of street lighting, this article exposes how social and political forces shaped the impact of artificial light on sleep and, more perniciously, on bodily autonomy. As a close reading of artificial light in three influential dystopian novels building on these historical contexts demonstrates, dystopian fiction challenges the commonplace assumption that the advent of the electric light, or of widespread street lighting in public urban spaces, posed an immediate or inherent threat to sleep. Beginning with H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1899), in which the eponymous sleeper emerges from a cataleptic trance into a future in which electric light and power are used to control the populace, representations of artificial light in early dystopian fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict a nightmare of total illumination in which the state exerted its control over the individual. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), constant artificial illumination plays a vital role in the chemical and behavioural conditioning undergone by individuals in a post-Fordian world. George Orwell intensifies this relationship between light and individual autonomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where access to electric current (and thus light) is limited at certain times of the day, brownouts and electrical rationing occur intermittently, and total illumination is used to torture and reprogram individuals believed to have betrayed Big Brother.

Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and The Grimm Brothers' Snow White

Abstract: Two film retellings of fairy tales from the 1990s exemplify how familiar fairy tales can be reshaped to address major cultural preoccupations. On the one hand, the utopian narrative Ever After affirms neohumanistic values such as deep memory, knowable origins, and teleology in narrative and culture. In contrast, The Grimm Brothers' Snow White is postmodernist and dystopian, hybridizing apocalyptic and Gothic narrative structures and themes, and drawing on modern phenomena such as "the beauty myth," to present characters playing out an old story to an outcome which resists both teleology and closure.

Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction: Chinese Visions of History and Dystopia2. Discomforts of Temporal Anomie3. Projections of Historical Repetition4. Alienation from the Group5. Anarchy: Social, Moral, and Cosmic6. Conclusion: The End of History, Dystopia, and "New" Historical Novels?List of Chinese CharactersNotesBibliography Index