Citations About Dystopian Literature

SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional "novum" (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.

2005-02-04

Quantitatively, the postulated innovation can be of quite different degrees of magnitude, running from the minimum of one discrete new "invention" (gadget, technique, phenomenon, relationship) to the maximum of a setting (spatiotemporal locus), agent (main character or characters), and/or relations basically new and unknown to the author's environment.

2005-02-04

The novum is postulated on and validated by the post-Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method. This does not mean that the novelty is primarily a matter of scientific facts or even hypotheses; and insofar as the opponents of the old popularizing Verne-to-Gernsback orthodoxy protest against such a narrow conception of SF they are quite right. But they go too far in denying that what differentiates SF from the "supernatural" literary genres (mythical tales, fairy tales, and so on, as well as horror and/or heroic fantasy in the narrow sense) is the presence of scientific cognition as the sign or correlative of a method (way, approach, atmosphere, sensibility) identical to that of a modern philosophy of science. Science in this wider sense of methodically systematic cognition cannot be disjoined from the SF innovation, in spite of fashionable currents in SF criticism in the last 15 years -- though it should be conversely clear that a proper analysis of SF cannot focus on its ostensible scientific content or scientific data. Indeed, a very useful distinction between "naturalistic" fiction, fantasy, and SF, drawn by Robert M. Philmus, is that naturalistic fiction does not require scientific explanation, fantasy does not allow it, and SF both requires and allows it.

2005-02-04

The principal technique of dystopian fiction is defamiliarization: by focusing their critiques of society on spatially or temporally distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable.

2005-02-04

Orwell himself later described the book as a warning against the excesses that might develop in England in the attempt to combat Stalinism -- much in the vein of Sinclair Lewis's earlier warnings to America in It Can't Happen Here.

2005-02-04

Within these societies the President becomes a diminished figure, in Player Piano scarcely more than a PR man to the computer. Here EPICAC is a "war-born" series (historically, the first US computer ENIAC was set up for ballistic research), expanding its "nervous system" to appropriate more and more socioeconomic functions.

2005-02-04

It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

2005-02-04

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a reversal of 1948 and the feel of that year in Britain; the era of post-war austerity, severe rationing, unrepaired bomb damage, shabbiness, weariness, and shortages of such things as razor blades and cigarettes, forms the dingy background of 1984. The dubious synthetic gin of wartime is still on sale. The pinkish-grey stew of the Ministry canteen must have been familiar to Orwell in the BBC canteen.

2005-02-05

"I don't believe that the kind of society I desctribe will arrive, but I believe something resembling it could arrive," wrote Orwell, "Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consquences."

2005-02-05

But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century, all the main currents of political theory were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

2005-02-06

Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.

2005-02-06

More often than not, stylistics defines itself as stylistics of "private craftsmanship" and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist's study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities, and villages, of social groups, generations, and epochs. Stylistics is concerned not with living discourse but with a histological specimen made from it, with abstract linguistic discourse in the service of an artist's individual creative powers. But these individual and tendentious overtones of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in which discourse lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract in such a formulation and therefore cannot be studied in organic unity with a work's semantic components.

2005-02-20

After the party left, Halyard was explaining that the house and contents and car were all paid for by regular deductions from Edgar's R&RC pay check, along with premiums on his combination health, life, and old age security insurance, and that the furnishings and equipment were replaced from time to time with newer models as Edgar -- or the payroll machines, rather -- completed payments on his old ones. "He has a complete security package," said Halyard. "His standard of living is constantly rising, and he and the country at large are kept protected from the old economic ups and downs by the orderly, predictable consumer habits the payroll machines give him. Used to be he'd buy on impulse, illogically, and industry would go nutty trying to figure out what he was going to buy next. Why, I remember when I was a little boy, we had a crazy neighbor who blew all his money on an electric organ, while he still had an old-fashioned icebox and a kerosene stove in his kitchen!"

2005-02-20

More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

2005-02-25