Introduction. Dystopia and Histories

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the dark side of Utopia-dystopian accounts of places worse than the ones we live in-took its place in the narrative catalogue of the West and developed in several forms throughout the rest of the century.1 No doubt prompted by H. G. Wells’s science fictional visions of modernity, a number of other works-E. M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” and, more famously, works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour-came to represent the classical, or canonical, form of dystopia. In a more diffused manner, works that shared the cultural ambience of the dystopian imagination (though often with ambiguity or irony) appeared on the margins of mainstream literature. These include titles as diverse and contradictory as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), Evelyn Waugh’s Love among the Ruins (1953), and Don De Lillo’s Underworld (1997). In the direction of popular culture, a more overt dystopian tendency developed within science fiction (sf), and this resulted in the “new maps of hell,” as Kingsley Amis put it, that appeared after World War II and continues in the dystopian sf of recent years (by authors such as Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Judith Merrill, A. E. Van Vogt, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon). In all these instances, to a greater or lesser extent, the dystopian imaginationhas served as a prophetic vehicle, the canary in a cage, for writers with an ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside.

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