Review: Everything for Everyone

I want to believe, I want to believe...

Mark Fisher famously said in his slim, efficient book Capitalist Realism that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (he mentions the sentiment as appearing in the works of both Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson). I have also seen people nowadays invoke the old Soviet concept of ‘hypernormalization,’ popularized by the Adam Curtis documentary of that name and borrowed from Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe the feeling among inhabitants of the late Soviet Union that boiled down to that Simpsons meme of “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas,” but on a societal level, to describe today’s world. It feels like we live not merely in late capitalism but in a capitalism that has completely overstayed its welcome. We in the United States have had the particular fortune of electing the dumbest motherfuckers imaginable to the highest offices in the land, and they are busy dismantling all the good things about the modern capitalist state and with it anything resembling even the twentieth-century consensus, leaving us in a full-on robber baron’s playground. What is painful, then, is how nobody seems to be able to think of a way out of it. Liberals and even leftists are left seemingly unable to imagine doing anything other than holding the line against a lumbering, smoldering beast that, as of writing, is poised to start a trade war because of one man’s narcissism.

It is in times like these it is good to remember that the human brain is capable of imagining alternatives, that we need to be imagining alternatives, because this situation is simply intolerable. There are reasons that higher education has been gutted throughout the Western world and the same applies to anything good in primary and secondary education, including the monomaniacal focus on STEM, which turns people into tools of our rulers, rather than those who can think clearly about who it is that rules us. The science fiction genre is filled with such attempts, such speculations, such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson or Octavia Butler or Cory Doctorow or Terry Bisson or Ursula K. Le Guin. I cannot think of a better time than [gestures vaguely at all this shit going on] to bring to the attention of the readership Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.

Like a good history book, the title tells you exactly what you’re in for. The book is, in fact, a collection of vignettes structured as interviews with participants in the great upheaval that overthrew capitalism in the city of Wall Street and replaced it with a communal way of living. The two narrators are versions of the authors, transposed a few decades into the future and conducting the interviews with the various participants. This form is a clever one, throwing the ‘fake history textbook’ form common in alternate history and in some other SFF subgenres (H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come is an early example) on its head; it allows simultaneously a larger view of events while keeping the human element there, with all its grit and drama and messiness. In a lot of alternate history writing there is a tension between those two elements, but here they are made complimentary.

What is so refreshing about Everything for Everyone is that it is an unabashedly utopian book; I am tempted to describe it as ‘Edward Bellamy but woke (complimentary).’ The format of the series of interviews prevents the utopianism from becoming dull, like so many plodding nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian novels that go on and on and on and on and on about the minutiae of how these worlds may work, with Bellamy’s Looking Backward being the most prominent example. Here, the world is explained naturally, logically, as the people being interviewed are those who had lived to see the changes. Abdelhadi and O’Brien pull another trick in having these interviews recorded with the intention of being saved for posterity, for people who never knew anything else than this utopia, so they can understand what the before time was like. This leads to interesting perspectives, and more than a few bits that are both grimly funny and cutting. The most damning one of these was how one character explains health insurance to children who have only ever known communally provided medicine.

This book is a work of intellect as much as a work of emotion, and much care is taken to show how our rotting capitalist citadel could collapse. It reminds me more than anything else of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which showed a way that capitalism could end in a way that my nebbish, autistic, heretofore vaguely libertarian mind could grok, setting me down the road to becoming a raging leftie during the pandemic. The revolution in this book is less like Robinson’s and more like the anarchism espoused by the likes of David Graeber, who had pointed out that most of the truly revolutionary movements of the past few decades have been of that tendency. It is revolution in the manner of Black Lives Matter, or the protests against the Palestinian Genocide that happened last year. So many people who have participated in those protests feel like the seed of a better world is there, and O’Brien and Abdelhadi take that feeling and rework the world around it.

The book is focused on New York, as the title would suggest, but you see the reverberations elsewhere. There are people, interviewed in New York, who have experience in the Midwest or the Canadian Prairies, a discussion of what would be done with the space resorts of the ultra-rich, and there is a whole chapter about the creation of a free Palestine. It is the last chapter that I found among the most interesting; I was quite impressed by it because it described a resolution to the grueling conflict in that region that did not simply end in one side wiping the other off the map. It was a chapter that left me filled with a melancholy, a mix of hope and despair, as on the one hand it gave us a roadmap, and on the other hand, the contrast to the razing of Gaza that only recently ended (and could easily flare up again at any minute).

It is the segment on Palestine that, perhaps unintentionally, reveals one of the profound strokes of this book. It is a moment that is extremely problematic - and yet looks profound because of how problematic it is. The Palestinian-American narrator uses the word ‘Zio’ to describe the Israeli government and its repression of Palestinians, in a manner that struck me as unaware that it was a term commonly used by neo-Nazis such as David Duke. It was a moment that gave me pause, and called to mind an interview between Kelly Hayes and Shane Burley with the appropriate title of We Don’t Talk Like Nazis, surrounding the Leftist use of the term ‘ZOG’ or ‘Zionist Occupied Government,’ which is indisputably an antisemitic slur used by aforementioned neo-Nazis. But, taken as a whole, that chapter’s anger is focused on the oppressive force of the Israeli state, rather than the Jewish people as a whole, and it mentions a number of Israelis joining in the creation of a free Palestine for all its citizens. You can read this in at least two ways: the character not knowing the source of the term, or the authors themselves not knowing the source of the term. From this, you can see the truth of all revolutions, even the best of them: they are not perfect. They are made by human beings, as flawed and as wretched and with so many blinders, who nevertheless fight for the good of the people, however they define it. It works both in-universe and in our universe; I don’t know if this was at all intended, but there’s something that works very well about it, if as an experience than as a work of fiction. I will caveat all this by saying that I am not Jewish, and would defer to opinions on the use of the word.

As luck would have it, this was the book I was reading in a diner as 2024 passed into 2025, as New Year’s Eve passed into New Year’s Day. It is a book with the calloused, worn, yet hopeful tenor of any number of old Black spirituals; its interviews are songs of despair, of suffering, and of aspiration. It’s a book that stirred something in me, as one year was about to flow seamlessly into another, one administration giving way to one run by madmen, fools, and sadists. This is a book that dares to hope, dares to dream, dares to say that all of this will end, that we, as human beings, can do better, must do better. The lords of silicon and oil are destroying the humanities to prevent a book like Everything for Everyone from being written, so that people cannot imagine their castles built on sand to come tumbling down. It is a book that wields Brecht’s distancing effect like a scythe, cutting down all the tawdry justifications for the cruelty of the world, while still never forgetting that the forging of a new world will be the story of people. I took a look at the world of this book and came away wanting to believe, needing to believe, in the world it promises. I hope the readers of this book, and this review, can do the same.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: O'Brien, E. M. and Abdelhadi, Eman Everything for Everyone [Common Notions Press, 2022]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview [book]: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

Far future Earth can have a little divine intervention, as a treat

It is a vast duty placed before me, dear reader, to convey the substance of Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels, these vessels of prose encompassing both the fantastic and the mundane, in a way which captures and reflects the essence with which their tenacious authors, with Muses' blessing and Sisyphus' patience, infused their creations. How shall your humble reviewer, fallible and distractible, presume encapsulate texts which, in their own turn, must be but a finite representation of the vast possibilities of the human imagination? This task becomes particularly acute when faced with a text of such length and densitude as Ada Palmer's "Perhaps the Stars", one which demands attention to every small detail and fleeting name which crosses its pages, and which synthesises its cogitations upon the future of our species with elements of both classical history and divine musing, creating a novel whose complexity would make even demiurgic Homer squint upon their poet's throne and go "u wot, mate?"

Or, something like that. Perhaps the Stars is the culmination of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, a four book "record" of events set 450 years in earth's future. The world of Terra Ignota is one where flying cars make it possible to get halfway across the world in a couple of hours; where geographic nations are mostly obsolete and humans have instead organised themselves into "hives" which regulate and shape their members in vastly different ways. Events in our near future and this Earth's comparatively-distant past have led to public displays of both gender and religion taboo: religious needs are dealt with quietly, through a system of counsellors and "reservations", and they/them pronouns are enforced in polite society. This being the fourth book in what is, at its core, a political epic, things have gone disastrously wrong by this point: so wrong, in fact, that humanity has been plunged into its first war in centuries. There's not much point in me going into the factors that led to that war, because if you haven't read the first three books, Perhaps the Stars might as well be written in a lost ancient script for all the sense you're likely to get out of it. What is important to know about this series is that that conflict, and all of its subsequent effects, involve two broad sets of forces. The first is the mish-mash of political, social and ethical questions created by this particular future, with all of its technologies and factions. Almost all of Palmer's characters struggle with the concept of "the greater good", particularly in the context of a war that their recent history has rendered practically unthinkable, and it's this dilemma, and the way that some characters' answers to it are beyond the pale for others (and vice versa) that really drives the events of Perhaps the Stars forward.

The second element is about what happens when humans interact with divinity. Terra Ignota has two on-page divine characters: Bridger, the child of the Saneer-Weeksboth bash' (think big extended chosen family unit), who is able to conduct miracles that bring inanimate objects to life and bend reality to their will, and Jehovah/J.E.D.D Mason, the adopted or actual child of basically all the current world leaders (long story, one of the weirdest aspects of the series) and who is by this point confirmed as a divine visitor being hosted by the Creator of our own universe. These two characters shift the story in particular, unexpected ways (Earth can have little a divine intervention, as a treat), and they also shape and are shaped by the series' primary chronicler: Mycroft Canner, a repentant mass murderer still inexplicably plugged in to global leadership and reverent upholder of the Greco-Roman Classics (and some early modern Europeans). Mycroft's constant invocations to Greek Gods, comparisons to Caesar, in-text dialogues with the ghost of Thomas Hobbes and other narrative quirks take the new Gods in Palmer's universe and weave mythology around them, putting them into the canon in a way that is deliberately archaic but... makes sense. Sort of. If you're up for this sort of thing. The divine influence on the story itself is equal parts maddening and intriguing, turning some problems from intractable to trivial with the snap of a finger (or the use of a magical resurrection potion that a kid drew on paper a few years ago), but also exposing cracks in the logic of human characters and their morality which ultimately helps drive things forward in unexpected, intriguing ways.

Keen eyed readers will note that one of those two factors is a science fiction staple: knotty, far-reaching political problems in future worlds? Sign me up! And one of them is, in 2021, extremely fucking niche. The Terra Ignota series is extremely upfront about that niche-ness - the acknowledgements and authors note of Too Like the Lightning explicitly state that this is a book seeking to join the Great Conversation, positioning itself in a canon with classical and early modern political philosophy - and on a technical level, that absolutely succeeds. There's some weird notes here and there, and the biases Mycroft himself brings into the text take some getting used to (side note: people who noped out of Too Like the Lightning because of its handling of the in-universe Gender Bullshit and are considering retrying it will find that while the series as a whole moves on, there's still a moment where Mycroft's co-chronicler documenting the genitalia (known and presumed) of everyone in high political office in order to prove that people with vaginas can pilot warships too! A moment of pure 25th century #girlboss energy that just... wasn't needed.) but Terra Ignota knows what it's trying to do, and by Zeus it does it. Perhaps the Stars is very long - the UK edition is nearly 600 pages to previous book The Will To Battle's 350, and the text is smaller - but its ups and downs, and the way the chronicle varies depending on who is narrating and what circumstances they find themselves in (for example, there's a deliberately unfinished chapter halfway through which lends a lot of power to the one that follows it), feels really well thought through. The first moves of this future war include individuals cutting off the instantaneous communication and transportation that characters take for granted, deliberately hampering the technologies with which the war is fought, and the story really sells that mildly contrived set of circumstances. An anachronistic narrative meshes with an anachronistic war, and it all just kind of works. Even the writing style, which gets very florid especially in chapter openings, is actually 99% interesting and readable once you're into it.

The question, then, is whether this very technically accomplished and very strange book is going to work for you, dear Reader. To answer that, I need to answer the question "was this technically accomplished and very strange book good for me?" and I have absolutely no idea. Reading this book was a lot of work, an effort that put significant amounts of other reading on hold as I struggled to focus through what it was trying to tell me. The political payoff, and the philosophical questions behind them, were well worth that investment: questions around the value of human life, and sacrifice, and at what cost a "short war" would come, and the trade-off between happiness and ambition, all were presented in a way that I think I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. Did I need that packaged in a classical-early-modern-mishmash with literal Gods and random greek hero reincarnations running around? Probably not, and what really holds me back from loving Perhaps The Stars is the fact that those Gods and classical allegories seem to pull the focus away from developing characters and just letting them breathe. Many characters from earlier in the series, especially the Saneer Weeksbooth bash' members, have vanishingly little screentime in what is, I remind you, a really very long book, and while I understand that part of this was their becoming less relevant to a war that focused on other actors, there's an awful lot of time spent building up the stakes for other characters based on their mythological roles more than any hard-won connection. Divine intervention, and Mycroft's own status as a creature favoured by Gods, also leads to tragedy which I can't forgive Palmer for, taking away a particular character at a moment when I felt they deserved self-actualisation. Mycroft is an interesting character, but I can't think of a more infuriating choice for "the one who gets divine plot armour at everyone else's expense" - and somehow the presence of actual gods here makes that feel even more unfair.

So, as the curtain closes on the War of 2454, I find myself facing another battle: do I recommend this book, and this series? Ultimately, I have to leave the choice to you, dear Reader: do you embark on a journey that takes far future political speculation and mashes it up with European history and philosophy in an unusual, intriguing and very particular way? Does the payoff of a philosophically dense science fiction series sound fun? Because if it does, and you have some time on your hands, and you accept that sometimes the character lists will be convoluted, and the main narrator will be kind of a dick, and untranslated Latin will occasionally appear on the page as if it belongs in a 21st century English novel, then this series is absolutely one to experience. If early modern and Enlightenment thinking intrigue you, and you want to see science fiction take that mode of thinking on, then oh boy do I have the book series for you. Perhaps the Stars is a culmination of a series that, more than most, needs a particular kind of reader: if this is you, you're going to like how this goes.

The Math

No, there is no math. I'm not scoring this one out of 10. It's... look... you just have to experience it, and then tell me what you think. (Then subtract 1 from the score for that ridiculous Lean In feminism page.)

 Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Palmer, Ada. Perhaps the Stars [Tor/Head of Zeus, 2021]

Microreview [Book]: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

A young adult tale of near-future utopia with a neurodiverse, trans protagonist which punches way above its weight in its complexity and thoughtfulness

Pet is the second published novel, and first young adult book, by author Akwaeke Emezi, following their debut Freshwater. It's a book that I've been meaning to get my hands on for far too long, and I was incredibly lucky to have some wonderful humans of the SFF community send a copy my way. As a relatively short and easy read, even for its age range, Pet was also perfect for the tail end of yet another winter cold: yet its a book that packs a punch well beyond what its length might lead one to believe.

Pet is the story of Jam, a girl living in the town of Lucille in an unspecified future time when many of the social problems and prejudices of our own time have been solved. Prisons have been abolished, queer family units and gender fluidity are considered normal, Blackness is casually celebrated, accommodations for disability and neurodiversity are commonplace, and the town is generally shown to have moved on from the bad old days of repression and discrimination, and from the revolution that caused the shift a generation previously. To Jam and others of her generation, the events of the past are told through the lens of "angels" and "monsters": the former, the revolutionaries who led from behind and got the work done that caused the change; the latter, those who upheld the system or committed crimes under it, and who needed to be stopped in order to create the relative paradise that Lucille has become. To suggest that the work of this revolution wasn't complete has now become almost taboo, and the idea that monsters might still be living in Lucille treated as unthinkable by the older generation.

And yet, to Jam and her friend Redemption, monsters are still very much a subject for debate, and the question about whether any remain in their community comes to the fore when Jam accidentally summons a monster-hunting creature called Pet from one of her mother's paintings. The appearance of Pet surprises Jam's parents, not because they weren't expecting a monster-hunting creature to be summoned from a painting, but because the time for summoning monster-hunting creatures from paintings is, as far as they are concerned, over. And yet, Pet is convinced that a monster is out there in Lucille, and that they are active in Redemption's house. Its up to Jam and Redemption to figure out who they need to protect and how - no easy feat when the adults they are closest to are determined to keep the information they might need to understand what's happening away from them both, and Pet's own motivations for the hunt seem to go against everything they've been taught about forgiveness and careful finding of information, not to mention making sure they have enough time to process and support themselves through the challenging new aspects of human nature that come to light.

Pet's narrative structure is narrow and straightforward, with a relatively small cast of named characters representing the wider community of Lucille and its "angels". We meet Jam's parents, Aloe and Bitter; Redemption's parents, Malachite, Beloved and Whisper and some more members of his family; the town librarian Ube; and the old revolutionary-turned boxer Hibiscus and his wife Glass. Having a small, family driven cast underscores the particular sense of community being projected in Pet, giving us characters who are selectively flawed and blind while ensuring that - for almost all of the characters - that blindness is in pursuit of understandable goals. In doing so, Pet punches far above its weight, turning what could be a slightly speculative after school special into a story with a ton of nuance about what makes a community strong and, in particular, how adults can create environments for their children to flourish. That its done in a utopia that never stops feeling like a utopia makes the message even stronger: this isn't a group of people who are about to be punished for believing that caring, inclusive communities without brutality and abuse are possible, but one whose understanding of how to protect that environment is about to be challenged - a wake-up call, but one that errs very much on the side of a positive reading of human nature.

At the centre of this is Jam herself, a resourceful and emotionally intelligent young protagonist who is both trans and neurodiverse. Jam's trans identity is dealt with unambiguously and matter-of-factly at the start of the story: as a three-year-old, she made it clear to her family that she was a girl, and since then everyone has treated her as such, and she's had informed access to all the hormone blockers and treatments to make her puberty as a girl straightforward. Once Emezi gets that out of the way, there's no reason for Jam's trans identity to come up again as anything other than when its relevant to a description (for example, mentioning after she's been standing outside that her estrogen implant feels cold under her skin). Being trans, or non-binary (as Redemption's parent Whisper is) is not a point of complication or conflict in the story, because nobody in Jam's life views it as complicated or controversial. Her neurodiversity impacts much more on how she interacts with the world around her, but here too Emezi doesn't make it a point of conflict. Jam is shown as averse to speaking aloud, and therefore uses sign language and other methods of communication with other people when she can. The narration also has her use synesthesia-like descriptions combining emotion with physical qualities, such as when "fatigue [collides] with her body" or Pet leaves "a tang of pride" in her room. Disappointment slithers, and sadness is twisted but soft. Having not read Emezi's other work, I don't know if this kind of description is common to their style, but here I read it as an aspect of Jam's voice, bringing to life a perspective that felt very different from my own while being totally comprehensible. Jam's use of sign, and of thought-speech with Pet, offers further nuance to the book's themes about communication, as characters are shown adapting to her preferred communication methods and the importance attached to them (vocalising her words being the method that requires the most effort and therefore has the most weight) but unable to communicate more than fairy-tale simplifications of the state of the world before her birth.

Ultimately, Pet is a story whose surface simplicity has enormous, complex depths. As a utopia, this might be the most interesting book I've read since Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, albeit one that doesn't go into great detail about how it's being upheld: problematising aspects of Lucille's social organisation without passing judgement on the people who developed it and their assumption that a better system was possible. It offers its protagonist a coming-of-age story about her place in the world that has nothing to do with her trans identity or neurodiversity, making it clear that her influence and voice on the wider community goes beyond any axis of self-acceptance. As a white adult cis woman, Pet is not a story intended for me, but it's a story I feel I really benefited from reading and I very much hope it finds its intended audience, and the rest of us along the way. Meanwhile, Emezi is an author whose future releases I'll be anticipating with great interest.

The Math
Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 gorgeous, evocative writing which brings characters to life without straying from an easy-to-read young adult style; +1 a complex, thoughtful story about community and coming of age

Penalties: -1 I could read so much more about the world of Lucille, even if it wasn't relevant to this particular story!

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet [Faber and Faber, 2019]

Feminist Futures: Herland

Dossier: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland [The Forerunner, 1915]

Filetype: Book (Originally Serialized)

Executive Summary: Three men — Vandyck, our narrator; Terry, a burly, brawling adventuring and conquesting-type; and Jeff, a milquetoast friend of theirs — are on an adventure in one of the remote parts of the world when they begin to hear rumors of a land populated entirely by women. On the return voyage, they concoct a plan to come back to the area secretly, and reconnoiter it by means of a small biplane. This they eventually do. During their flyover, they discover a geographically isolated plot of land apparently populated only by women, but the adventurers refuse to believe that the structures and systems they observed could have been built entirely by women. They decide there must be some corresponding society nearby exclusively of men, who do the designing and building and keep the race going through means of procreation.

Upon landing, the three men are immediately captured by a group of martial-looking women they nickname “the colonels,” and they awaken in some type of fortress prison, although in reality it seems more like a closely-watched dormitory than a prison. Over the next several months, the men are treated essentially like young children, being taught the language and basic fundamentals such as the history of this Herland society, in order to be able, ultimately, to communicate. Their spheres of contact with Herland are limited to their dormitory, tutors, and a guard of “colonels” to keep watch over them. The men attempt escape, and develop theories and plans, each in their own particular idiom. Terry dreams of conquering these women and making them his sex slaves, assuming they will willingly bow down to the sight of his raw masculinity. Jeff seems to worship the women as goddesses, ready to become subservient to them and their culture. Vandyck occupies the middle ground, dutifully reporting the comings and goings and trying to be a good sociologist.

Many months pass, filled with questions from the tutors about the larger world and its society, the answers to which the women find utterly befuddling. These questions center on gender roles and societal structures. Eventually, the men choose mates, and the six of them make an attempt at some type of physical relationships. However, when Terry attempts to force himself on his “wife,” it is determined that the men are not compatible with Herland. Terry is expelled, Vandyck and his “wife” Ellador accompany him back to the wider world, and Jeff stays behind.

Feminist Future: Coming from the tradition of 19th century utopias, Herland offers less in the way of a vision of a possible future society than a vision of how society might be written differently if given a fresh start. This is a vision of a world unto itself that never endured what might be considered the original sin of — to use a more modern term — toxic masculinity. We are shown a world that has almost no want, no crime, a focus on rationality and sustainability, untouched by testosterone-fueled competition and desires for dominance displays, and into this world is injected Terry, who personifies the worst of all of these qualities. The implication is that Herland is a speculative society that could have been, but not one that can be. While the wide world yet has Terrys in it, the utopian vision of Herland can never be realized.

Hope for the Future: In the world of the novel, the status quo remains essentially unchanged. Jeff stays behind with his pregnant wife Celis, so Herland will soon see its first non-virgin birth in two millennia (as long as it's not a Terry, they should be fine), and Terry, Vandyck, and Ellador head back to America, with some trepidation as to how Ellador will cope. But as a blueprint for how we might shape our actual, real-world society, Herland does present a number of guideposts for ways in which we might change our thinking and practices to achieve a more balanced and equitable world.

Legacy Largely forgotten for half a century, Herland was re-discovered during the second wave of feminist science fiction (published as a novel for the first time in only 1979), and has become something of a scholarly touchstone in the fields of both utopian/dystopian fiction, as well as feminist literary fiction.

In Retrospect: When read today, Herland evokes a complex blend of insight (“Wow, that’s an idea way ahead of its time!”), disappointment (“Damn, how are we still struggling with this 100 years later?”), and cringing (“No! Those are very backwards ideas about race!”). On the one hand, it is a radical thought experiment that is executed with a tremendous willingness to question first assumptions that underpin the society that helped produce it. The three men are broad archetypes, but rendered in such a way as to serve their didactic purposes. The women, however, are essentially all the same. They may have a few variations in basic temperament, but it’s hard to point at any actually compelling characters. The women of Herland are presented as a monolithic ideal. There is a lot of value in looking at the ideas assembled here, even today, as so many of these questions still need answers. While society has changed a great deal, there are still some fundamentals that have not evolved nearly as much as they should have, and Gilman’s ideas may not be directly applicable curatives, but they can certainly inform conversations that still need to be had in the 21st century.

Where the novel must get seriously dinged, though, is in one of the areas where many feminist works are accused of short-sightedness, and that is the area of intersectionality. Gilman’s personal views on race, from what I was able to glean from a little biographical probing, were abhorrent, and in keeping with many of the prevailing views of her time. Not H.P. Lovecraft bad, but certainly in the context of a writer who was willing to re-visit basic assumptions of how society is structured and organized, envisioning radically different power structures, the lack of vision when it comes to racial prejudices is indefensible. The other intersectional area in which omission is particularly glaring to today’s reader is sexuality. While Terry is held up for derision for his belief, essentially, that the sight of a “real man” would turn the women of Herland into subservient sex slaves, Gilman does seem to imply that all of the women are latent heterosexuals. There is, in fact, no indication of any kind of sexual drive or exploration of any kind. Sexual relationships between the women of Herland are not even hinted at, and quite the contrary, the idea of pairing off in any kind of romantic way is held up as a strictly masculine construction. Any sense of sexual gratification by one’s self or with another woman is utterly absent from Herland. Such an omission does more than invalidate entire groups of people, it also undermines core arguments of the text. In supposing that jealousy, desire, and romantic relationships are the province of destructive masculine drives, much of the foundation of Herland’s vision of a better possible world seem Pollyannia-ish at best, and exclusionary at worst.


Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 2/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 6/10

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012.

A Conversation about Dystopia with Malka Older

Malka Older was kind enough to spare some time for a Google Hangout session so we could chat about all things Dystopia. 

Malka Older

Shana DuBois (SD): Let's start with your basic concept/definition of a dystopia.

Malka Older (MO): So, my concept of dystopia differs quite a bit from the common usage, and I fully understand that people may see it differently, but for me the idea of dystopia builds off the idea of utopia, and so I see them as opposite but equivalent. If a utopia is impossible to fully realize, and probably pretty boring and static once you get there, a dystopia should be the same: a state that is the opposite of perfect, so hopelessly bad that it is almost impossible for it to occur and more or less static and depressing if it does

I can make allowances for "utopian" and "dystopian" as being so tires that don't fully reach those states but kind of lean that way and certainly thinking about the terms in those kinds of absolutes somewhat limits their usefulness (because how many books/ideas really go that far, in either direction?) but for me the devaluation of the term dystopia in recent popular culture, where any future that is remotely authoritarian or has experienced any kind of mass disaster event is called a dystopia, is more problematic. Categorizing those scenarios as extreme and all but impossible future imaginings obscures the degree to which they are 1) easily imaginable results of the dynamics of where we are now and/or 2) occurring in some form (without the futuristic technology, with different names and locations, etc) in the present.

SD: I like your distinction about utopias and dystopias being the static extreme ends of a spectrum and therefore connected. If we removed the limiting lens of those terms as they are commonly accepted today, how would that open up pop culture ideas, from a creation standpoint? Or do you think we're already too steeped in a preconceived, and limiting, concept when it comes to dystopian elements in media (books/movies/games/etc)?

MO: I can only speak for myself, but I imagine those terms rarely come in at the creative process. I mean, maybe there are people out there who think, now I'm going to write a dystopia, but I think it's more common for a creator to have an issue of particular concern, or a terror of some specific outcome, and write it out. Those labels usually get put on in marketing (or reviews), so I worry more about their impact on consumers than on creators. Such distinctions serve a role in directing people to what they feel like reading (a cheerful future or less so, and that's a choice I respect and make all the time based on mood), but like I said they make it easier for people to distance themselves from the real implications of those works.

SD: Excellent point regarding creator versus consumer and how/when the terms come into the mix.

MO: They are also very broad terms, as the Kincaid essay in Nerds of a Feather notes. So, again on the critical side, there's room for a lot of interesting work about the *kinds* of so called dystopias (and, much less commonly, "utopias") we come up with. Some of that is already going on, but more recognized flexibility in the terms would be nice.

SD: For work categorized as dystopian, or even utopian, what role does illusion, or a constructed reality, versus reality play? Is such a break required to reach those extreme ends?

MO: The issue I see is that it is works of science fiction, or occasionally fantasy, that are categorized this way. If a fictional work set in the present (or the recent past) describes a horrible system, it is described as "realism" - which is pretty interesting, when you think about it. But add a few genetically modified birds and futuristic fashion and suddenly it's a made-up dystopia. Now, of course it's normal to take speculative fiction with a grain of salt, but for me the power of writing in a speculative way is that it gives us a different perspective with which to examine the here and now. 

"Realism" in literary fiction can be very powerful, but it can also give readers a way to say "that specific person is not me, that specific country is not mine, how sad this is and how beautifully written. So, glad I'm not involved in this story." What we often hope for in speculative fiction is for readers to be enjoying (or horrified) by the story and suddenly have a realization, partway through, where they recognize themselves, and their lives, through the funhouse mirror: if this were different, if that were different, if I change the names, oh, she's talking about us. Of course, it doesn't always work, and I'm not arguing for speculative fiction to the exclusion of literary realism, rather that we need both, because people's brains and empathy mechanisms work in different ways. 

SD: Continuing that train of thought, how much does your background and experience with humanitarian aid/development come into play with your writing and the story growth? And the desire to create a connection between the reader and the world around them?

MO: That is really important to me, maybe because I've had the experience so many times of being hired to go somewhere that I knew of only through stories - referring to the stories of news reports and the myths of common knowledge and connotations - getting there and finding that it is a reality like any other. When I was hired to go to Darfur, I was of course scared, because we're taught to be - of course, some very terrible things have happened there, but they have also happened in places we're not taught to be scared of - but I was confident enough to go because at that point I had enough friends in the business that I knew some people who had worked there. When I got there, and was in the place working next to people who lived there, for whom it was their daily life, it suddenly became real and much less frightening (I was briefly scared only a couple of times while I lived there, and all were because of misunderstandings). At the same time, though, it makes the terrible things that happened and happen there much more real to me, because they are no longer abstract terrible things happening in an already abstractly terrible place, but awful, unwarranted disruptions in ordinary lives of ordinary people, some of whom now happen to be my friends. That process, of moving from an abstract idea to something concrete and familiar and therefore meaningful, is what we'd like fiction to do: creating empathy and broadening our experience to places where we can't personally go.

This is why I worry about the label dystopia; I think it makes it easier to continue to say this is not a real place, these are not things that really happen, they are impossible. Usually they are things that happen, at most slightly exaggerated or slightly adjusted. Even if the writing is effective at putting the reader in that place, the label can allow them to distance themselves again.

SD: What do you think about your debut novel, Infomocracy, often finding the label dystopia applied? The events in that novel don't feel terribly far-removed from the world we live in now and yet it is often discussed as a far-future and extreme possibility.

MO: First I want to repeat what I said at the beginning, that I know my definition of dystopia is not the common usage; I'm not here to convince everyone that I'm right, you do you. Also, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that other people experience my novel in a different way than I do, in fact I think that's pretty awesome (and really interesting). So, I don't have a problem with people calling Infomocracy a dystopia. I do find it a little baffling, and fascinating, and I wonder why it has been so pervasive. After all, this is a book that's set about 50-60 years in the future that shows few signs of scarcity or impending apocalypse (there are some signs of climate change impacts, but nothing suggesting massive disaster), has some cool and effective new tech, and is not only mostly democratic, but mostly micro-democratic. So why is it so scary, why is it a future we would want to avoid? (I should note I'd be almost as baffled with people calling it a utopia. I didn't mean for it to be one or the other, but on balance I do see it as slightly more hopeful than not). 

I could be wrong about this, and I'd love to hear from people about it, but I suspect that it has a lot to do with the pervasive surveillance in this world, even though that surveillance is not in the service of a single government and almost all of it is available to be seen by anyone (so, very different from Big Brother-type surveillance). If that's the case, it opens up a really interesting discussion about real-world surveillance, not just by governments but by companies and individuals, and how far that is from what is described in the book, and how we get lulled into ignoring additional surveillance as it becomes normalized. Do people find it scary as a possible future, or as a slightly tweaked version of our present, in which companies follow where we go on our phones and track not only our purchases but our searches and there are cameras not only on the streets but on our most commonly used devices, pointing at us all the time?

This brings me to something I found really interesting about Kincaid's essay. In that history of utopias and dystopias, there's a common element: order. The original utopia was, as Kincaid described it, about order: "it could be reached structurally: this perfection was not the province of god or of fairies or some supernatural inversion of the natural world, this perfection was achieved by rational men [...] For More [...]perfection was always equated with order. [...] within any society, order was what brought happiness."  But the later dystopias are also about order achieved by rational men: about utter control and regimentation. This odd similarity in the dichotomy suggests something about how why these terms are so popular. They reflect our struggle with the (relatively new) concept of a government that creates order in our lives. Much of the recent history of political science and government is looking for ways for us to govern ourselves through rules and order that protect us from the worst of what humans are capable of.

It's a paradox, because no number of rules can completely protect us from abuse or autocratic take-over; in fact, the more rules there are the more dangerous it becomes when the wrong person/people are in power. We try and try and try to rationalize and order everything, and yet there is always the human element in determining how it works - and in fact, dystopia tells us, it is when we succeed in exorcising the human element that we are in the most danger of oppression. So rather than a linear range, we're looking at more like a circle where at their edges, the extremes of utopia and dystopia are not so far apart. 

This is especially true because, except in the most perfect examples of these extremes, the experience is not the same for everyone. That's something else that tends to get flattened out by diluting the concept of dystopia: that in the modern concept they include a lot of inequality. For those people at the top, it's not a dystopia, it's closer to a utopia. Everything's working fine and ordered exactly the way they like it!  

That's an area that could use some more discussion in understanding what we're really afraid of.

Also, that is related to a problem I have with Kincaid's essay. The Handmaid's Tale is not a *feminist* dystopia. Yes, it is feminist, but there's no need to qualify the label. For one thing, as I recall things were not so great for most men in that world either. It's like calling 1984 a worker's dystopia or something.

SD: You brought up the power of the human element. In a lot of dystopias/utopias, we see a world where conformity has become a standard and individuality eroded. How does the disappearance of choice lead to the erasing of the individual thus leading to a dystopian/utopian environment?

MO: Again, this is something that comes up in relation to Infomocracy. In fact, there's a scene in which Mishima wonders whether it is the idea of its many nameless bureaucratic workers that makes people uncomfortable about Information. Similarly, I wonder if people see some kind of uniformity in the book that makes them label it a dystopia, even though the basic idea is about offering more choice in a democracy. So interesting how one person's choice is another's tyranny.

But I do think you're hitting on a really key concept. We want the bad people to be controlled, but the good people to be free. Since it's hard to define bad and good, and definitions differ from person to person, it's an impossible problem; hence the closeness between utopias and dystopias

SD: Do you think this fascination with dystopian works is a very American, or Eurocentric, concept specifically because privileged developed countries view themselves as approaching utopian ideals and the rest of the globe as a dystopian existence?

MO: I don't feel like I'm an expert on this, but my impression is yes, very much so. I've had conversations with people about, for example, The Hunger Games (which I loved, btw, speaking strictly about the books) and how I don't think it's a dystopia because it describes, with flourishes and fictionalization, things that have certainly happened throughout history and are happening to some degree RIGHT NOW in various places, and the answer comes back "well yes, but it's set in the United States, so part of the dystopia is linked to things going so badly that it happens here." 

First of all, the US is not so far off from many of the concepts in the book, and if there's anything we've learned from history it's that if it happens somewhere, it can happen anywhere (seriously, name me a country/region/people that hasn't committed "dystopia"-like atrocities in its history). Secondly, in my opinion, dystopias aren't about something bad having happened: they're about the systems that allow oppression and exploitation. If those systems exist somewhere, then this is not an extreme, impossible ideal: it's a commentary and a way of looking at the world we know. 

Also, and this is where I don't feel like an expert, I don't think the label is applied as readily to books that come from outside of US/Europe. Is it because we believe those places are already that bad? But I haven't done a comprehensive enough review of what has and hasn't been called a dystopia to say that with any certainty.

SD: With resistance often being a large element within dystopian works why do you think we keep the application so narrow? For example, LotR is centered around a very focused resistance to what would be the end of the world as they know it and yet I've never seen it categorized as a dystopian work.

MO: Well, the flip side of it is besides resistance, the oppression has to be somehow systematic, tied into government (I'm not sure when this became a part of the definition, but it does seem to be, and that distinguishes dystopian from, say, apocalyptic fiction). So, while Mordor presents a picture of what dystopia could look like in effect, the fact that it's created/managed/ruled via magic (or whatever you want to call it, elemental forces that are different from the ones in our world) it is harder to connect with it in that way. Which I think tells us something about what we are concerned about with these labels.

But it is interesting that fantasies - I'm thinking of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe too, and many others - often take a very similar form: the way the bad magic is defeated is often similar to the way oppressive government is defeated, and the way it's used has the same effects, so there are some parallels there. And then you have the fantasies that don't involve magic per se (like Baru Cormorant) but do exist in other worlds, with different place names and customs, and those I think are unfairly excluded, because they often provide very sharp analysis of these mechanisms.

Maybe that's why the Hunger Games feels like fantasy, because initially you don't know that it's set in a future United States: initially you are dealing with made-up names and a seemingly made-up place, with a future technology that's a little hard to distinguish from whimsical magic. It's a nicely done twist, actually.

SD: How would you like to see either the definition and/or genre of dystopian/utopian works grow moving forward?

MO: Honestly, I'd just like to see both words but especially "dystopian" used much more sparingly. I don't have any problem with the books they're used to describe; as I said, the labels usually come after the fact. I do think there might be some interesting work to be done in questioning and pulling apart some of the assumptions built into them, whether that work is done through fiction or through criticism.

SD: Any additional parting thoughts you'd like to share with the NoaF readership?

MO: Just to say again that even though I disagree with the broad application of the word dystopia, that phenomenon itself is really interesting and can tell us a lot about both literature and our society, so I'm glad NoaF is digging into it!

---

I'd like to thank Malka for taking the time for such an engaging conversation!

POSTED BY: Shana DuBois--extreme bibliophile and seeker of raindrops.
 

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS Guest Post: Paul Kincaid, "Can't Get There from Here"

Dystopian Visions is excited to welcome noted SF/F critic Paul Kincaid, with a guest post on the relationship between dystopia and utopia. Paul Kincaid is the author of two collections of essays and reviews, What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction and Call and Response, and he is currently working on a book about Iain M. Banks. He has received the Thomas Clareson Award from the SFRA and the BSFA Non-Fiction Award.

In Four Voyages, published in 1507, Amerigo Vespucci reported that, on one of his voyages to the New World, he had left 24 men at a fort on Cape Frio. One of those men, Raphael Hythloday, set out from Cape Frio on a journey south through various curious and unknown countries, until he reached an island separated from the mainland by a man-made canal. This island was a realm called Utopia, after its founder, King Utopus. Raphael spent some time in a country that seemed to him most excellent in its organisation, until, after a few years, he reluctantly decided it was time to return to Europe. There, in July 1515 in Antwerp, he was introduced by the noted scholar Peter Giles to a visiting Englishman who was taking a break from a diplomatic mission. This Englishman, Thomas More, spent time talking with Raphael about his journeys and afterwards wrote it up in a book he called Utopia.

There had been perfect places before, of course. Heaven was the most widely known, the aspiration towards which all Christians (which at the time was assumed to mean all Europeans) yearned. But there were more secular versions, places like Hy Brasil or the Land of Cockaigne, places in which rivers flowed with wine, in which meats and fine food hung plentifully from the trees. A version of Cockaigne became the Big Rock Candy Mountain, known to American hoboes of the Great Depression. They were places of sensual pleasure and repletion, lands marked out by being the diametric opposite of the hard life of famine and disease that was the daily lot of those who dreamed of these places. And they knew they were dreams, they knew they were forever out of reach, that was part of the attraction.

What marked Utopia out from these fantasies of plenty was that it could be reached, and reached in two ways. Reached physically: there was a long, arduous but supposedly practicable journey that could get you from here to there. It was a journey beyond the abilities and wishes of most people, but the idea was established that perfection did not exist only in dreams or upon death, but here in the everyday world we all inhabited. And it could be reached structurally: this perfection was not the province of god or of fairies or some supernatural inversion of the natural world, this perfection was achieved by rational men. If a safe, secure, happy existence could be achieved by sensible human organisation in Utopia, then sensible, rational men could achieve the same here.

Thomas More had been born in a time of war, and had been raised amid the fears and disruptions caused by that war. When he was seven years old he was part of the crowd watching as the new king, Henry VII, rode into London fresh from his victory at Bosworth. At that point, within his short lifetime, two Kings of England had died violent deaths. For More, therefore, perfection was always equated with order. After the disorder of war, the order of peace was desirable; and within any society, order was what brought happiness. He went to his death because Henry VIII’s repudiation of the Catholic Church was, to More, a repudiation of the natural and proper order of society. Unsurprisingly, therefore, More’s perfect society was an ordered society, modelled at least in part on monastical life.

But this was the Renaissance. Printed books, the rediscovery of ancient scholarship either rescued from the fall of Constantinople or found lost amid the stacks of monastery libraries, new technologies, all contributed to the rapid spread of ideas. Utopia was printed and reprinted at an incredible rate, mostly in Latin but also in a multitude of other languages, it was read by scholars the length and breadth of Europe, its ideas were discussed, taken up, developed. Utopia entered the language. And writers across Europe produced their own utopias, restructured to reflect their own ideas of perfection or notions of rationality. In an age of religious turmoil – Luther nailed up his 95 theses the year after Utopia was first published and thus ushered in nearly two centuries of almost constant religious wars – there were religious utopias (The City of the Sun by Thomas Campanella); in an age of scientific observation and experiment, there were scientific utopias (New Atlantis by Francis Bacon); in an age beset by plague there were medical utopias (A Godly Regiment against the Fever Pestilence by William Bullein); in an age of agricultural reform there were utopias advocating for precisely such reforms (Macaria by Gabriel Plattes).

Utopia was, to this extent at least, a flexible thing, its character ever changing. As the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries began to change in character around the middle of the 17th century, becoming more political, so utopias became political. There were, of course, fictional political utopias, as in Oceana by James Harrington, but more and more works of overt political philosophy were taking on a utopian aspect, from Thomas Floyd’s The Picture of a Perfit Commonwealth to Gerard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom in a Platform. The dominant form that utopian writing would now take was political, influencing in particular those writers calling for radical or revolutionary change, from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx.

By this time, fiction was becoming less studiedly utopian. Utopias shifted away from unexplored corners of our own world to the moon (The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin), to a parallel Earth accessible at the poles (The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish), into a future in which the Jews have recognised the true nature of Christ thus signalling the Second Coming (Nova Solyma by Samuel Gott). But inevitably the nature of these other locations, or the means of getting there, became more interesting to both writer and reader than the utopian situation found on arrival. As the Abbé Raguet observed in 1702, utopias are inherently static because having achieved perfection there is no change either possible or desirable, and hence utopias are boring. Utopias would, of course, continue to be written throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th century, but few writers solved the problem of boredom. Indeed, most of these utopias were polemical in nature, advocating for a particular cause, and these writers weren’t particularly interested in solving the problem of boredom since they felt that the cause was of more than sufficient interest for anyone.

***

But almost as soon as there were utopias heralding the achievement of rational humanity, there were anti-utopias that celebrated irrationality. One of the earliest of these anti-utopias, and therefore a work that can be said to provide a template for the form, was Mundus Alter et Idem (Another World and Yet the Same) by Bishop Joseph Hall. Published in 1605, it took its protagonist through the grotesque lands of Terra Australis: Crapulia, a land of gross physical indulgence; Viraginia, ruled by unruly women; Moronia, where the institutions of the Catholic Church are imitated; and Lavernia, a land of thieves.

More’s original Utopia had been intended, at least in part, as satire, but in fact the form was not well suited to satire. An ideal society can be held us as a contrast to the disorder of quotidian existence, but it is not so easy to shape it into a weapon attacking that disorder. To that end, the absurd and grotesque caricature of the anti-utopia is a far more effective mode for satire. Thus the great satires of the 18th century, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal”, were anti-utopian in character.

Utopias continued to be written, of course, usually to advocate for some particular ideal. For instance, the rise of feminist and suffragist movements towards the end of the 19th century produced a rash of stories about female-run societies that were invariable utopian in character, such as Legions of the Dawn by “Allan Reeth” and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Similarly, the varieties of socialist thought that arose during the latter part of the 19th century each produced their own notions of utopia, from William Morris’s bucolic News from Nowhere to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a work that was so successful that it spawned hundreds of Bellamy Clubs to discuss the utopian ideas it contained. But though forward looking in their aspirations, these were all old fashioned in their approach, and despite the few that have survived (Gilman, Morris, Bellamy) the vast majority of the utopias written at this time sank without trace. Meanwhile anti-utopias continued to be deployed satirically, though their excess grotesquerie tended to detach them from reality and from their utopian wellspring.

***

It wasn’t until the early years of the 20th century that utopian fiction was given a new lease of life. In fact there were two changes that happened just a few years apart, one was a reinvention of straightforward utopian fiction, and the other was a remaking of the anti-utopia into something very different, the dystopia. Both these changes stem, I think, from an encounter with the modern, both the literary modernism of Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their confreres, and the technological modernism that wrought devastating changes upon war and politics.

I should point out that if the reinvention of utopia seems to come largely from literary modernism, it was not without an acute awareness of the effects of war and politics on the modern world. And if the emergence of the dystopia seems to emerge out of the horrors of warfare and totalitarianism, the influence of literary modernism can still be traced through its course.

Let me first and briefly look at the emergence of the modern utopia, before turning to spend a little longer considering the creation of the dystopia.

The reinvention of utopian fiction at the beginning of the 20th century is down to one man: H.G. Wells. A decade before his famous split with Henry James, Wells was a close friend of James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford and other writers intimately involved with the new literary movements of the age. He was an advocate of Darwinian ideas of evolution, as filtered through his one-time tutor, T.H. Huxley, and therefore believed that all things change. Similarly, the ideas of Freud, which had already informed the fiction of his circle of friends, suggested notions of impermanence. Thus, although Wells was a utopian, the utopia he envisaged could not be the static and absolute structure it had been in previous centuries. Much of his fiction had utopian overtones, but his first major work on the theme was the novel A Modern Utopia in which he began to explore the idea that utopia was not a place, not a destination, but a process. The ideal, the perfect state, is almost certainly unattainable, but utopia is the process of striving towards that ideal.

The horrors of the First World War, the mechanised warfare he had already partly foreseen in “The Land Ironclads” and The War in the Air, and the rise of totalitarianism, all fed into the mix from which any future utopia must grow. But again and again throughout the rest of his career Wells would return to the image of utopia as process rather than achievement. It was there in fiction such as The Shape of Things to Come as much as it was in his non-fiction, such as his advocacy for the League of Nations.

More importantly, all subsequent utopian fictions, up to and including more ambiguous works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, reflect the idea that utopia is not a final achievement, but a process of trial and error, a striving towards a goal that is forever retreating from us.

***

But although utopia was reinvigorated by this new sense of movement, by the notion that utopia was not an unchanging monolith about which all the author could ever do was provide a guided tour, but rather something fluid and changeable into which plot and story could be woven, utopia in the 20th century was still overshadowed by its upstart twin, the dystopia.

If dystopia emerged from the horror of modern war and the threat of totalitarianism, then we first have to consider its absence.

The first modern war was the American Civil War, which saw mass slaughter on an industrial scale. In one day at Antietam, more Americans were killed in battle than in all future wars up to and including D-Day combined. There was trench warfare, there were battling ironclads, there was the precursor of the machine gun; yet the Civil War produced no dystopian fiction. Why this might be is not altogether clear, but my feeling is that America was not philosophically prepared for the patterns of thought that produced dystopias. What underlies most dystopias is the idea of an authoritarian body – the state, the military, a corporation – conspiring to rob the individual of rights, of identity or of worth. But in America at the time of the Civil War transcendentalism still held sway, a philosophy that proclaimed the inherent goodness of people and of nature, and that the institution could not long stand in majesty over the self-reliance of the individual. The popular response to the Civil War, therefore, was largely sentimental: shock at the scale of the slaughter, mourning for the individuals lost, a rash of ghost stories in which those individuals returned. But though the war was seen as an aberration in the natural goodness of the world, there was no perception of the state as a giant machine crushing the individual.

Five years after the end of the Civil War another war in Europe produced another shock to the system. The Franco-Prussian War, and the events of the Paris Commune that followed it, changed the world order. The unification of Germany under the imperial rule of Prussia ushered a new military power onto the world stage, threatening the existing Great Powers of Britain, France and Russia that had maintained the peace in Europe since the defeat of Napoleon. And the German Kaiser was portrayed as exactly the sort of autocrat whose inhuman monstrosity spelled doom for the individual. Allied propaganda during the First World War, which showed German soldiers bayonetting babies, for instance, made Germany out to be the soul-crushing military machine typically found in dystopias. Yet, again, there were no dystopias.

This case is actually more subtle and more interesting than the American Civil War, because what German unification did result in was a mass of invasion stories, typified by George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. Such stories remained immensely popular right up to the First World War (When William Came by Saki appeared in November 1913). And their popularity was not confined to Britain; variations on the invasion story appeared in France, America (where the threat was sometimes of British invasion), and even in Germany. Such stories are not strictly speaking dystopias, though they might be considered precursors to dystopias, or at least to that branch of dystopia in which Hitler won the Second World War. What they are, rather, is propaganda, a sustained call for increased military spending, for compulsory military service, for rearmament, or for any other plan the author might have to increase readiness for a war that would in time come to seem inevitable. As such they play a small but not insignificant part in the arms race that characterised the years leading up to the First World War.

Such invasion stories fed directly into both science fiction and spy fiction; The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers both emerged from and in response to the invasion story. Their part in the development of the dystopia is less immediate and less overt.

Two further events were needed for the emergence of the dystopia: the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

The First World War destroyed faith in a way that the American Civil War did not. Yes, there was an explosion in spiritualism immediately after the war, a hunger for contact with the dead, but this was not a spiritual renewal. Every family in Britain, France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe had been directly affected by the war. So many men were killed that the old social order could not be restored. The First World War put women into the workforce, and gave them the vote; it ended the power of the landed gentry, since there was no longer the workforce available to sustain their estates; it generated discontent with the political system that had resulted in the war, and hence gave rise other political forces, notably fascism and communism. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires brought disorder and unrest to Central Europe and the Middle East, storing up conflicts that would not be long in emerging. In the immediate aftermath of the war there was an economic boom that made the 1920s into a decade-long party; but the economic consequences of the war festered long and resulted in the collapse of the 1930s.

The First World War was not an aberration in the natural world order, it was an evil, a moral, political and social wrong, and someone had to be to blame. Everyone laid the blame on a different group: Jews or bankers, governments or the people, aristocrats or hidden conspiracies. How the blame was apportioned didn’t matter, what mattered was that people were now able to think in terms of powerful secretive cabals running the world according to some hidden agenda, while you and I and everyone else was simply a cog in their machine. When you remember that this image found direct expression in such dystopian films as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis it is clear that somewhere in the aftermath of the war and the revolution the impression had arisen that the worth of the working man had been devalued by those in power. They had been fed into the machine of war, and now they were being fed into the machine of industry.

Anti-utopias had used grotesque images to poke fun at the world, but now the world itself had become grotesque and it was not fun any more. The response, perhaps the only possible response, was to transform the anti-utopia into a form that reflected the sense of helplessness in the face of the horrors unleashed by the modern world.

***

The second and more immediate trigger of dystopias was the Russian Revolution, out of which emerged the first significant dystopia: We by Yevgeny Zamiatin. The Revolution was itself a response to the chaos of the First World War, but the nobility of its stated aims, equality for all, was belied by its use of civil war and terror. Moreover, it did not take long before it was apparent that equality was to be achieved not by elevating the individual, but by crushing individuality into a dull uniformity. This is reflected in Zamiatin’s novel, in which the protagonist, a number not a name, is subjected to constant state surveillance, and when the power of love generates some individuality in him it is forcibly removed by the greater power of the state.

That We was the model for all future dystopias is almost literally the case. When the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West, one of the first reviews of the book was written by George Orwell. And he, of course, re-used the plot of We in his own dystopian novel about the power of the state to crush the individual, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Echoes of We resurface also in the great American dystopia of the same period, One by David Karp.

The all-powerful state was not necessarily communist, of course. Another version of the soul-crushing faceless state is encountered, for instance, in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which perhaps stands as a hybrid between dystopia and absurdist anti-utopia. Nevertheless, the all-powerful and dehumanising state, characterised in Orwell’s terms as a boot stamping on a human face forever, did tend to reflect a fear of and antipathy towards communism in many of the dystopias from the middle years of the 20th century. Later, in the same way that utopian fiction came to serve as a platform for particular ideas and movements, so dystopias were adapted for specific causes, the feminist dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for instance. Even so, the model adopted by these later dystopias is recogniseably the same one we have found in We and Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I tend to identify them as part of the same branch of dystopia.

In contrast there is another branch of dystopian literature that started to appear a little later. The Soviet Union established a totalitarian regime of the left, one that Western governments , particularly after the Second World War, viewed with alarm. It was a world order that, if it got its way, would be all-encompassing and leave the individual no way out of its Kafkaesque coils. So this branch of dystopia tended to emphasise the helplessness of the individual in the face of the all-powerful institution. But for a while the more successful totalitarian regimes in Europe were on the right: the fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany, the falangists in Spain. And since the atrocities of Nazi Germany in particular were more quickly and more widely known than the Gulags of the Soviet Union, this generated its own form of dystopian fiction.

The earliest of these fascist dystopias appeared even before the Second World War, perhaps the most notable of them being Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (originally published as by Murray Constantine). While Western governments had identified the Soviet Union as an enemy state from the moment of its inception, those same governments were still trying to appease Nazi Germany, despite Germany’s aggression, Hitler’s violent rhetoric and his overt anti-semitic attacks. In common with a number of other anti-fascist dystopias that appeared in the late-1930s, however, Swastika Night argued that Nazi Germany could not be normalised by taking Hitler at his word when he spoke of a thousand-year Reich. This dystopian state is shown to be ruthless, violent, vile in its treatment of women and minorities, but it is also shown to be crumbling from within due to its own contradictions.

Some of the communist dystopias and their ilk, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, include suggestions that the regime within the body of the novel has subsequently collapsed. But that collapse happens outside the timespan covered by the novel; within that focus the regime is invariably monolithic, unchallenged and unchallengeable. The stories tell us about the tragedy of the individual caught within this trap; and the stories are invariably tragedies, for the individual there is no escape. The fascist dystopias, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on the fragility of the state, and though the individual caught up in it may go through torments, there is always the prospect of redemption, renewal, escape.

This distinct path in dystopian fiction became more obvious after the Second World War, when Nazi Germany had in fact been defeated, and fascist dystopias transmogrified into a form of alternate history in which Hitler won. The known interest of the Nazi High Command in the supernatural has allowed authors to make extravagant rituals central to their dystopias, the hunting of humans in The Sound of His Horn by Sarban, the terrifying Christmas ritual played out in “Weinachtsabend” by Keith Roberts, so that here an element of absurdist anti-utopia creeps back into the dystopia.

In the main what we take away from this branch of dystopian literature is how easily the Second World War might have turned out otherwise, or (in “Weinachtsabend” or in Farthing by Jo Walton) how readily British politicians would have accepted Nazi rule. But no matter how cruel and authoritarian the regime might be, it is patently not the monolith we encounter in the communist dystopias. And where there is fragility there is an opportunity for the hero, who is often portrayed as that symbol of integrity a detective, as in Farthing, SS-GB by Len Deighton, or Fatherland by Robert Harris, to uncover the secret that could bring down the whole regime, or at least rescue one person from the horrors.

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What I am proposing, therefore, is that since dystopia emerged early in the 20th century as a counter-argument to utopia, two main strands of dystopian literature have developed. There are, undoubtedly, other individual dystopias that do not fit fully or easily into either of these patterns, but for now I think that the two strands I have identified are dominant.

In the one that I have characterised as “communist dystopia” the focus is upon the tragedy of the helpless individual in the face of an all-powerful entity. This entity may be, and usually is, a government, though it could as easily be a corporation, as in The Circle by Dave Eggers. Generally, though not always, there is no way out for the individual, to be an individual is to be a victim in the face of what the modern world has wrought.

The other strand, which I have characterised as “fascist dystopia”, offers the hope of heroism, the chance of escape, because what we see here is that the institution is never as all-powerful as it pretends to be. The very brutality of the regime is liable to be exaggerated simply because it is disguising a fatal flaw, as for instance in Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood, and those who survive the brutality, or find a way to circumvent it, may also find a way to exploit the weakness. Inevitably, as dystopian scenarios have been adopted for Young Adult fiction such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, it is this strand of dystopia that has been chosen, because it allows the focus to be not on the horrors of the regime but on the heroism of those who find a way to subvert or escape it. Where, in communist dystopias, to be an individual is to be hopeless, in fascist dystopias, and particularly in the YA variants on the theme, to be an individual is to represent hope.