Conclusions

What is the point of all of this dystopian fiction? Dystopian fiction, more than any other kind of literature, is inextricably tied to the time period in which it was written. At the outset, I asked two questions: “Why would Jack London and Octavia Butler both choose to write capitalist dystopias even though they are separated by race, gender, and a good ninety years? What makes the circumstances of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley so different that their respective novels should be so different?” The answer lies in the fact that dystopian literature is written to address unique problems that exist in the societies of its authors. Jack London and Octavia Butler both lived in eras in which capitalism was a perceived social ill. Not only did they attempt to get their readers to understand and recognize social injustice, but they induced those readers to do something about those social ills. The reader is an integral part of dystopian literature, for it is the reader’s attitudes that will allow the future to come true as written down, or to change into something better. This is why some dystopian works lose meaning as time goes on, necessitating annotations in the case of Bernard Crick’s edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four: an audience which does not come from the culture of the novel’s author – including from a culture in a different time – may not understand the object of attack, since it is not the target audience. Dystopias are written with particular cultural vocabulary in mind. Even the settings and events in dystopian novels may be unrecognizable to foreigners: people not living in the United States in the 1980s would not immediately equate Gilead with the Religious Right. The book was not written in an attempt to explain such a situation to all people, everywhere: it was written for Americans in the 1980s so that they might recognize the encroachment of religious conservatives and do something to stop it.

Where utopian literature gives social criticism by offering for comparison a world better than the one we live in, dystopian literature gives social criticism by offering for comparison a world worse than the one we live in, suggesting that there are problems to be solved and we can do better. The narratives of dystopias are themselves pessimistic, but their inherent suggestions are optimistic. “Dystopian critiques of existing systems would be pointless unless a better system appeared conceivable,” says Booker (15). The authors who write dystopias hope that their literature will key their audiences in to existing social problems, and after learning about these problems, they might improve their world and change the course of history from dystopia to something better.

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