On Dystopia 

M. Keith Booker

A review of the film Never Let Me Go (2010) by USA Today writ-

er Maria Puente is tellingly titled “According to Sci-Fi Movies, the
Future Isn’t Looking So Good.” Though the film at the center of the
article is not actually set in the future, Puente notes that it resembles
many recent films that are set in the future in the way it envisions a
world informed by social practices that seem horrifyingly grim—in
this case, the production and raising of human clones specifically so
that they can be used as organ donors, their organs harvested one by
one until they die. For Puente, this film is thus a typical one, illustrating
the tendency of recent science-fiction films to present “a near or far-off
future that is dystopian—the failed utopia in which ideals have been
replaced by repression, violence and rampant inhumanity.”
If nothing else, this invocation of the notion of dystopia in a dis-
cussion of popular culture within the pages of a popular newspaper
for general readers indicates the way in which this notion, once used
mostly by critics and scholars within the academy, has since gained
much broader currency. And it is certainly true that the addition of the
word dystopia to our common, everyday vocabulary is indicative of
both a dark turn taken by our popular culture and a broader pessimistic
turn in the general mood. Partly, no doubt, this development is due to
the imitative nature of our popular culture; thus, the earlier success of
dark cinematic visions of the future, from Blade Runner (1982) to the
Terminator sequence (1984–2009) to the Matrix trilogy (1999–2003),
breeds a tendency for audiences to expect such visions and for film-
makers to gravitate toward producing them. Moreover, the prevalence
of dystopian visions of the future can no doubt be attributed to the fact
that such visions probably open up more interesting visual and narra-
tive possibilities than do more utopian ones.
On the other hand, the dark turn taken by the American popular
mood and the dystopian turn taken by American literature and popular

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 culture in the early twenty-first century are also responses to real, spe-
cific events in recent history, such as the September 11, 2001, bomb-
ings that essentially ushered in the new century, not to mention the fact
that the US economy has been in sad shape pretty much throughout the
century’s first decade and beyond. It would be a mistake, however, to
overemphasize these events alone as background to the trend toward
dystopian visions of the future in Western culture. A certain turn to-
ward pessimism in modern culture really starts not at the beginning of
the twenty-first century but at the end of the nineteenth, when an even
deeper economic depression had bedeviled the capitalist economies of
western Europe for some time and colonial misadventures such as the
Boer War had contributed to an overall sense of crisis, perhaps most
clearly embodied in the turn-of-the-century notion of degeneration: the
theory that, far from moving inexorably forward in its social and bio-
logical evolution, the human race could quite possibly move backward
toward savagery. As R. B. Kershner notes, much popular discourse at
the time was informed by a quite far-ranging fascination with this no-
tion. Such fears seemed all but confirmed a few years later when World
War I, an event without any clear, logical purpose or cause, became the
most deadly and destructive occurrence in human history.
In the realm of literature and the arts, this early twentieth-century
sense of crisis was embodied in the phenomenon of modernism, in
which writers and artists sought new forms and techniques out of a
sense that the world was changing so rapidly that earlier approaches
to art and literature were becoming obsolete and irrelevant. Such art-
ists quite often envisioned even bigger changes on the horizon, as is
perhaps most vividly captured in the poet W. B. Yeats’s image of a
“rough beast” of uncertain nature slouching apocalyptically toward
Bethlehem to be born, along with an entire new era of human history.
Meanwhile, much of the thought that transformed Western civiliza-
tion in the first decades of the twentieth century was fraught with anxi-
ety and warnings that the changes taking place would not necessarily
be for the good. The three great thinkers who together created the intel-

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 lectual background to modernism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche,
and Sigmund Freud—all in their own ways introduced exciting ideas
that could be used to envision brave new worlds of the future, while
at the same time providing warnings that the future might in fact be
dark indeed. For example, Nietzsche’s vision of the potential rise of
a new form of superior human who could throw off the shackles of a
repressive past might have been cast in emancipatory overtones, but
for some it provided philosophical support for the ruthless treatment
of the weak by the strong. However inappropriately, Nietzsche’s vision
was thus conscripted by the German Nazis as intellectual justification
for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history. Meanwhile,
Freud’s attempts to help humanity break free of other forms of repres-
sion took a dark turn even within his own career, as he himself came
to conclude, in the late work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),
that the social contract binding human societies together was repres-
sive and that civilization itself was inimical to human happiness. And
Marx’s own critiques of capitalism contained the warning that what he
saw as the inevitable collapse of capitalism would not necessarily lead
to a more enlightened socialist world, but might instead lead to an even
more barbaric social system.
As the twentieth century proceeded, events such as World War I,
the Great Depression, the Holocaust, World War II, and the Cold War
arms race seemed to add support to the notion that the darker sides
of the visions of thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were
more likely glosses on human history than the brighter ones. Even in
post–World War II America, when the United States was emerging as
the most affluent and powerful society on the planet, individuals came
more and more to suspect that they were becoming little more than
faceless cogs in a huge and impersonal corporate mechanism. Little
wonder, then, that literature would respond with the dark visions that
we have come to know as dystopian. As Tom Moylan puts it, clearly
identifying the real-world roots of dystopian fiction, “Dystopian nar-
rative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century . . .

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 [such as] exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, dis-
ease . . . and the steady depletion of humanity through the buying and
selling of everyday life” (xi).
This pervasive modern sense of crisis underlies any number of mod-
ern cultural forms, linking such phenomena as modernism, dystopian
fiction, and film noir and identifying all of them as part of a widespread
anxiety in reaction to the tribulations of modernity. Further, and espe-
cially in relation to dystopian fiction, it is important to recognize that
this modern sense of crisis was made all the more intense by the extent
to which it was a reaction to frustration at the outcome of centuries of
utopian dreams related to the coming of the Enlightenment in the West.
Informed by a new faith in the capabilities of individual human beings
and in the ability of humans to comprehend their world through the
application of reason and rationality, the Enlightenment also involved
an early confidence that human beings would be able to use this new
understanding of the world to modify and improve it, eventually build-
ing better or even ideal societies.
It is no accident, for example, that one of the earliest texts herald-
ing the coming of the modern era was Thomas More’s Utopia (1516),
which gave its name to a new genre of fiction devoted to imagining
the possibilities of better human societies in which the social, politi-
cal, and economic problems of the real present have been solved (or
at least in which effective mechanisms for the solutions to these prob-
lems are in place). Just over a hundred years later, Francis Bacon’s
New Atlantis (1627) marked the growing importance of science as the
key to utopian progress. And by the late nineteenth century, Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), one of a flurry of contemporary
utopian fictions, responded directly to the recent Industrial Revolution
to provide still greater details concerning the possibilities of building
a better world through science. By this time, however, the concerns
and events noted above were beginning to create increasing concern
that Enlightenment modernity was leading not to utopian dreams but
to dystopian nightmares.

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 Types of Dystopia
As novels and films widely regarded as dystopian have become more
and more common, it has become increasingly obvious that the general
term dystopia can be (and has been) applied in a number of differ-
ent ways. It should be emphasized, however, that the mere fact that a
novel or film features a grim future does not make the work dystopian.
To be dystopian, a work needs to foreground the oppressive society
in which it is set, using that setting as an opportunity to comment in
a critical way on some other society, typically that of the author or
the audience. In other worlds, the bleak dystopian world should en-
courage the reader or viewer to think critically about it, then transfer
this critical thinking to his or her own world. Thus, dystopian fiction
closely resembles Darko Suvin’s influential characterization of science
fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement,” placing readers
in a world different from our own so as to stimulate thought about the
nature of those differences and cause us to view our own world from
a fresh perspective. Indeed, for our purposes here, dystopian fiction
can be defined as the subgenre of science fiction that uses its negative
portrayal of an alternative society to stimulate new critical insights into
real-world societies.
In contrast, one might compare dystopian fiction with the related
category of postapocalyptic fiction, which deals with human attempts
to survive in the aftermath of some sort of widespread disaster (such
as a nuclear war, a devastating plague, or a large-scale environmental
catastrophe) so destructive as to bring about the collapse of civilization
as we know it. Postapocalyptic fictions can lead to the rise of dystopian
regimes, and they can certainly serve as cautionary tales, as when they
warn of the potential consequences of continued nuclear-arms devel-
opment or environmental irresponsibility. But postapocalyptic texts do
not generally focus on the details of the imaginary societies they por-
tray so much as on the collapse of the preexisting society and are not
therefore properly dystopian.

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 One of the most widely cited attempts to establish a coherent termi-
nology for utopian and dystopian fiction is that proposed by the emi-
nent scholar of utopianism Lyman Tower Sargent, who has suggested
the following scheme:

Utopia—a non-existent society described in considerable detail and nor-

mally located in time and space.

Eutopia or positive utopia—a non-existent society described in consid-

erable detail and normally located in time and space that the author in-
tended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the
society in which that reader lived.

Dystopia or negative utopia—a non-existent society described in con-

siderable detail and normally located in time and space that the author
intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than
the society in which that reader lived. . . .

Anti-utopia—a non-existent society described in considerable detail and

normally located in time and space that the author intended a contempo-
raneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular
eutopia. (9)

However, Sargent’s distinction between utopia and eutopia is seldom

observed. In this volume, for example, the term utopia will generally
be used to mean an imagined better society, in place of his eutopia.
Further, this volume will use the term dystopia for both the negative
utopia and the anti-utopia.
Sargent’s categories do, however, provide a way of distinguishing
between two basic types of dystopia. The first type, what he calls the
negative utopia, is generally an “if this goes on” cautionary tale, warn-
ing of the dire consequences that might occur should certain trends al-

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 ready under way in some contemporary real-world society, usually the
author’s own, be allowed to continue. For example, Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) responds directly to then-recent devel-
opments in American politics, such as the defeat of the Equal Rights
Amendment and the growing political power of the religious right, to
imagine the sort of society that might be established should right-wing
religious groups be allowed to enact their antifeminist political agen-
da as official policy. The second type of dystopia, what Sargent calls
the anti-utopia, warns against the potential negative consequences of
seemingly utopian projects, as when Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924)
warns (presciently, as it turns out) about a possible dark side to the uto-
pian dreams of the then-new Soviet Union and of rationalist modernity
as a whole. In its extreme form, the anti-utopia is skeptical not just of
any particular utopian program but of utopianism in general. Finally,
though, it should be noted that these two categories of dystopia are
generally a matter more of emphasis than of distinct difference. Thus,
the Christian conservatism featured in The Handmaid’s Tale might be
seen by many of its proponents as utopian, but Atwood’s central con-
cern is to critique it as a current trend in American politics. Similarly,
We makes indirect reference to real-world tendencies in the postrevo-
lutionary Soviet Union, but Zamyatin is primarily concerned with dan-
gers involved in the overly rigid pursuit of the rationalist utopianism
that informed the Soviet project.
Alternatively, one could categorize dystopias in terms of their fun-
damental relationship with utopian thought. In this scheme, one might
see the classic dystopia as one that focuses on critique of whatever
social or political practices are examined in the text. The critical dys-
topia, on the other hand, is more nuanced; while critiquing certain
negative practices or institutions, this type of dystopia retains a strong
utopian dimension, emphasizing that there are alternatives to the dys-
topian conditions being portrayed.

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 Brief Survey of Dystopian Fiction
Bellamy’s Looking Backward was the classic late nineteenth-century
vision of a utopia based on scientific and technological progress. Yet it
was followed two years later by William Morris’s News from Nowhere
(1890), an equally compelling utopian text that challenged Bellamy’s
premise and imagined instead a peaceful, pastoral utopia in which tech-
nology has largely been abandoned in favor of living in harmony with
nature. This fundamental opposition among classic utopian texts made
clear the notion that one person’s utopia might be another person’s
dystopia. Soon afterward, H. G. Wells became the father of modern
science fiction with a series of works in the 1890s, many of which con-
tained strong dystopian impulses, though Wells would become known
as a crucial utopian writer as well. In 1907, the American Jack London
published The Iron Heel, which is sometimes considered the first true
dystopian novel, though it has utopian components as well and looks
back on its dystopia as a thing of the past. Soon afterward, E. M. For-
ster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) was another one of the
first purely dystopian works, and one that already illustrated the com-
mon ground between dystopian fiction and literary modernism.
Zamyatin’s We can be considered the first novel-length true dysto-
pian text; it would be followed by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
(1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which
joined We in defining the terms of the modern genre as a response to
the anxieties of the modern world. For example, if We warns most spe-
cifically against potential abuses of the postrevolutionary system in the
Soviet Union, Brave New World looks in the other direction, project-
ing nightmarish extensions of the current system of Western consumer
capitalism, which had recently emerged and was already in a state of
collapse. Nineteen Eighty-Four is suspicious of both capitalism and so-
cialism, suggesting that either, as it exists in Orwell’s 1940s world, has
the potential to develop into an oppressive totalitarian system devoted
primarily to its own preservation rather than to enriching the lives of
the human beings who must live in that system. The plots of all three

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 of these novels center on the (failed) attempts of individual heroes—
Zamyatin’s D-503, Huxley’s Bernard Marx, and Orwell’s Winston
Smith—to overcome the suppression of individualism by their dys-
topian states. In this and other ways, they set the tone for many of the
dystopian texts that followed them.
All of these three founding texts are primarily of the anti-utopia
type, and the same might be said of Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), one of
the earliest American dystopias. Though Rand’s novel clearly targets
the Soviet Union, it is first and foremost a radically individualist work
that expresses skepticism of the communalism that has been com-
mon to utopian visions from More’s onward. However, if-this-goes-
on cautionary tales began to appear early on as well. In To Tell the
Truth . . . (1933), for example, Amabel Williams-Ellis follows Huxley
in warning of the dystopian potential of capitalism, but she specifically
imagines a Britain in which the worst tendencies of the early 1930s
have continued to develop, producing a grim, authoritarian, and im-
poverished (though in many ways technologically advanced) society.
In the United States, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
warns that contemporary fear of communism might push America to-
ward fascism. Such antifascist cautionary tales were particularly prom-
inent in Great Britain in the 1930s, including Storm Jameson’s In the
Second Year (1936), Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), and
Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939).
This tradition, especially Burdekin’s text, helped to set the stage for
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which has been important background
to virtually every dystopian text since, including the work of Anthony
Burgess, who, in works such as A Clockwork Orange (1962) and The
Wanting Seed (1962), was clearly influenced by Orwell. Particularly
important in British dystopian fiction is the series of novels written by
John Brunner, beginning with Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and extending
through The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The
Shockwave Rider (1975). Of these, The Jagged Orbit focuses on rac-
ism and the criminalistic tendencies of the military-industrial complex,

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 while The Shockwave Rider focuses on the impact of a worldwide
communications explosion, in many ways anticipating the later phe-
nomenon of cyberpunk science fiction, a movement that has itself
shown considerable dystopian leanings.
In the United States, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) respond-
ed to certain specific American anxieties of the early 1950s, especially
the fear that automation was beginning to make human labor obso-
lete, while at the same time turning people into machinelike autom-
atons living thoroughly scripted, regulated lives. Ray Bradbury fol-
lowed soon after with Fahrenheit 451 (1953), wherein an oppressive
state employs teams of “firemen” whose job it is to seek out and burn
books, which are strictly forbidden in this society. Harry Harrison’s
Make Room! Make Room! (1966), meanwhile, resembles The Want-
ing Seed and Stand on Zanzibar in focusing on the social and political
problems that might arise from overpopulation. Harrison’s novel, how-
ever, is probably most important as the basis for a 1973 film adapta-
tion, Soylent Green; this film was typical of the dystopian turn taken
by American science-fiction film in the early 1970s, with such films as
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), George
Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972),
Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975), and Michael Anderson’s Logan’s
Run (1976) all exploring dystopian themes. Films such as Blade Run-
ner (1982), Total Recall (1990), The Matrix (1999), Minority Report
(2002), Equilibrium (2002), V for Vendetta (2006), Children of Men
(2006), and Never Let Me Go (2010) have extended the genre of dysto-
pian film into the twenty-first century.
The 1970s have been widely recognized as a time of resurgence in
utopian fiction, especially by women, but the decade also saw a no-
table surge in the production of women’s dystopian fiction. For exam-
ple, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), perhaps the most
important of the women’s utopian novels of the decade, contrasted its
anarchist utopia with a capitalist dystopia within the same text. Joanna
Russ’s The Female Man (1975) also presented both utopian and dysto-

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 pian visions, as did Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
These novels, along with works such as Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk
to the End of the World (1974), started a trend that culminated in
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, undoubtedly the most prominent dys-
topian text to date to focus on issues of gender and patriarchy. Other
works, including Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), have
focused on similar issues as part of a generally dystopian vision.

New Trends in Dystopian Fiction

The increasing popularity of dystopian fiction and film in the early
twenty-first century raises the possibility that dystopian visions are in-
creasingly becoming mere spectacles of misery that, if anything, simply
encourage audiences to feel better about the present, therefore losing
the critical power that is key to the genre. In addition, it could be ar-
gued that the increasing familiarity of dystopian visions threatens to
strip even the most powerful dystopian fictions of their critical power;
no longer shocking or even surprising, the images presented in these
works may make it harder for the fictions to produce the kind of cogni-
tive estrangement that is crucial to their impact as works of social and
political critique. At the same time, there are new trends that may poten-
tially reenergize the genre for new generations of readers and viewers.
The first of these trends is a growing tendency to situate the repres-
sive power normally associated with dystopian societies not in govern-
ments but in private corporations. This phenomenon dates back at least
to Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic work The Space Mer-
chants (1953), in which corporations dominate a grim, dystopian future
and US congressmen represent specific corporations rather than con-
stituencies of voters. And sinister corporations, such as the Weyland-
Yutani Corporation of the Alien films (1979–97), have been prominent
in science fiction ever since. But this tendency, fueled by the grow-
ing power of corporations that marked the Reagan-Bush years (1981–
92) in the United States, began to accelerate with works such as Jack
Womack’s Ambient (1987), which turned out to be the first in a sequence

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 of six novels in which the huge Dryco Corporation becomes the domi-
nant force in American society, culminating in the 2000 novel Going,
Going, Gone. In the meantime, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992),
in which rampant privatization has rendered governments almost ir-
relevant, also joined this tendency. More recent works exploring the
dystopian aspects of corporate capitalism include Max Barry’s Jennifer
Government (2003) and Company (2007), Richard K. Morgan’s Mar-
ket Forces (2005), Thomas Nevins’s The Age of Conglomerates (2008),
and Dani and Eytan Kollin’s The Unincorporated Man (2010).
Another important new trend in recent dystopian fiction is the grow-
ing importance of the genre in young-adult fiction. Again, this trend
goes back several decades, at least to such works as Andre Norton’s
Outside (1974) and Monica Hughes’s The Tomorrow City (1978). A
major impetus in the growth of young-adult dystopian fiction came
with the publication of Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993), which became
a popular teaching text in American schools, though it was controver-
sial and was frequently banned from school curricula and libraries.
As Carrie Hintz notes in her discussion of young-adult dystopias, the
popularity of this book “sensitized readers to the important subgenre
of utopian and dystopian writing for children and young adults” (254).
It then became not only the first volume in a trilogy, and the basis of a
planned 2012 film adaptation, but also a forerunner of numerous other
young adult dystopias.
For example, in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2001), an example
of the postapocalyptic dystopia, the world known to young readers
at the beginning of the twenty-first century has collapsed. The social
world has fragmented into a dog-eat-dog (actually, city-eat-city) world
in which much of the planet has degenerated into independent city-
states, many of which (including London, with which the book is cen-
trally concerned) travel about on wheels, driven by gigantic engines,
raiding smaller cities for technology and raw materials. This book was
hugely successful in Great Britain, where it triggered a resurgence in
young-adult science fiction in general. It also gained a following in the

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 United States, where a number of other young-adult dystopias have ap-
peared recently, including Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember (2003),
which later became the first volume in a quadrilogy as well as the basis
of a 2008 film adaptation. Other recent young-adult dystopias include
M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), Caragh M. O’Brien’s Birthmarked
(2010), Maria V. Snyder’s Inside Out (2010), Ann Aguirre’s Enclave
(2011), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011).
Particularly indicative of the dark turn taken by young-adult science
fiction in recent years are Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) and
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), both of which present
dark, dystopian pictures of the American future, though in very differ-
ent modes. Doctorow’s book, written in a vaguely cyberpunk mode,
presents a very-near-future account of an oppressive American politi-
cal climate that is extrapolated only slightly from the present-day re-
alities of PATRIOT Act America. Here, the “War on Terror” morphs
easily into a war on American civil liberties, accepted passively by
most adults but battled heroically by a group of high-school computer
hackers. Meanwhile, the title’s reference to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four makes it clear that the book is to be read within the tradition of
dystopian fiction. On the other hand, Collins’s book, the first volume
in a trilogy, looks into a more distant future in which more extreme
changes have occurred. Collins gives few details, merely mentioning
in passing “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the en-
croaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war
for what little sustenance remained” (18). In short, mostly natural and
environmental disasters have created a crisis that is made even more
severe by the human response to the crisis, leading to the collapse of
the United States and the rise of Panem, described as a “shining Capi-
tol” (18) somewhere in the Rockies, surrounded by thirteen subordi-
nate districts, though one of these districts has been obliterated in an
uprising against the Capitol that was brutally put down.
Ultimately, Collins’s teenage protagonist helps to lead a success-
ful revolution against the Capitol; it is not clear that the new regime

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 is all that much better than the old, though at least the Hunger Games
will presumably be terminated. Doctorow’s teenage protagonist uses
his computer skills (and the help of several allies) to score a temporary
victory over the forces of oppression, which in that text are largely
composed of the US Department of Homeland Security. Neither of
these texts has an unequivocally happy ending, though their protago-
nists are more successful than are those of most adult dystopias. Other
recent young-adult dystopias have had even more positive conclu-
sions, raising the question of their effectiveness as cautionary tales, as
does the fact that they often focus more on plot and character than on
exploring the characteristics of their dystopian societies. Nevertheless,
the growing popularity of young-adult dystopian fiction and its subse-
quent spillover into film suggests that the form will remain vital for the
foreseeable future.

Critical Resources
Dystopian fiction and film have received considerable critical atten-
tion, and significant resources are available to provide better critical
understanding of the genre. In addition to many published essays on
individual works or groups of works, a number of book-length studies
have attempted to describe the phenomenon of dystopia in a larger criti-
cal context. For example, Mark Hillegas’s The Future as Nightmare:
H. G. Wells and the Anti-utopians (1967) remains useful, if limited in
its focus, for its discussion of the work of H. G. Wells as a starting point
for modern dystopian fiction. More recently, Gary Saul Morson’s The
Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions
of Literary Utopia (1981) explores the phenomena of utopia and dysto-
pia within the framework of genre theory, while Krishan Kumar’s Uto-
pia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times (1987) provides helpful historical
backgrounds to a number of specific works. No Place Else: Explora-
tions in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (1983), a collection edited by
Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander, is one of the most
useful of several edited collections on utopian and dystopian fiction.

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 My own Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (1994)
provides brief discussions of dozens of dystopian novels, as well as a
number of dystopian plays and films; it also includes discussions of
some of the most important utopian works and some of the most rel-
evant theoretical backgrounds to modern dystopian fiction. This refer-
ence work accompanies my critical study The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (1994), which focuses
on the dual modern traditions of anti-Soviet and anticapitalist dysto-
pias, among other things. The most important recent work on dystopian
fiction has been that of Tom Moylan, beginning with Demand the Im-
possible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), which
focuses on the resurgence of utopian fiction in the 1970s but also con-
tains substantial commentary on dystopian fiction. Moylan’s Scraps
of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000) is a
more sustained study of dystopian fiction with a special emphasis on
the critical dystopia. Finally, the essay collection Dark Horizons: Sci-
ence Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003), edited by Moylan
and Raffaella Baccolini, contains a number of discussions of various
dystopian works and the phenomenon of dystopian thought as a whole.

Works Cited
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2009.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1961.
Hintz, Carrie. “Monica Hughes, Lois Lowry, and Young Adult Dystopias.” Lion and
the Unicorn 26.2 (2002): 254–64.
Kershner, R. B., Jr. “Degeneration: The Explanatory Nightmare.” Georgia Review
40.2 (1986): 416–44.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boul-
der, CO: Westview, 2000.
Puente, Maria. “According to Sci-Fi Movies, the Future Isn’t Looking So Good.” USA
Today. USA Today, 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 11 Apr. 2012.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies
5.1 (1994): 1–37.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.

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