1George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, is “the one literary dystopia everyone knows,” having sold perhaps twenty million copies and thereby “outsold all the rest of the utopias and dystopias ever written put together” (Claeys 2017, 391). Both Orwell and his classic dystopia received increased attention in the years leading up to 1984, with “enthusiastic arguments about whether Orwell had been wrong, partially wrong or prophetically accurate,” and “debates about whether the novel should be read as a warning or a prediction” (Lee 2001, 144). Had the world of Big Brother – a world of omnipresent surveillance screens, greedily confiscated power structures, constant linguistic revisionary tactics, and ruthlessly utilitarian biopolitics – materialized? As Raymond Williams underlined in the 1984 reissue of his 1971 monograph on Orwell, the point was not to “run a silly kind of checklist on the projections” and dismiss the book because no “Anti-Sex League” or “Two-Minute Hate” had actually been instituted, but to heed the book’s warning that “totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere,” even in Britain (Williams quoted in Lee 2001, 148-149).
2In the field of literature, the “Orwellian moment” of 1984 was marked by “new editions, a new film version, commemorations, and conferences” on Orwell’s work, which “helped to spark a general interest in the creative possibilities of dystopian narratives” (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 3). A “dystopian resurgence” may be identified around 1984, evidenced by the republication of Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night and the appearance of The Handmaid’s Tale, both in 1985 (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 3). In the latter, Margaret Atwood purported to present “the world according to Julia [the female protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four]” (Atwood 2011, 146). Anthony Burgess’s 1985, which includes a series of interviews on the topic of Orwell’s legacy and a novella set in the year of the title, had already been published in 1978. 1984 is also the year when Scottish author Alasdair Grey published the novel 1982, Janine, another landmark text (discussed in Peter Clandfield’s article in this issue) which negotiates Orwell’s legacy. As evidenced by the resurfacing of Orwell in public discourse with every surveillance scandal, such as for instance the Snowden revelations in 2013, “Big Brother, thoughtcrime, doublethink, the telescreen, Newspeak” constitute an “‘Orwellian’ vocabulary […] almost identical with how we imagine ‘totalitarianism’ and other forms of the surveillance state” (Claeys 2017, 391). This special issue of Sillages Critiques seeks to probe the contemporary forms of dystopia in Britain, and to assess whether there is such a thing as a British posterity of Orwell. Have topics changed? Perspectives been modified? What are its formal and thematic legacies? Have the end of the Cold War and the rise of new threats made it obsolete?
- 1 Jeremy Bentham coined the word in 1818, on the basis of the Greek kakos, which means “bad.” Anthony (...)
- 2 “I may be permitted, as one who, in common with many of my betters, have been subjected to the char (...)
3Etymologically, “utopia” – sometimes spelled “outopia” – means “no” or “not place.” Thomas More, who coined the word in 1516, punned on “eutopia” – the “good” or “happy place.” Dystopia, it follows, means “bad place” (Sargent 1994, 5). As for “dystopia”, it combines “two Greek words, dus and topos, meaning a diseased, bad, faulty, or unfavourable place” (Claeys 2017, 4). The first uses of the word may be traced to the eighteenth century (with the appearance of the word dustopia in 1747, and its definition as “an unhappy country” in 1748). John Stuart Mill used the adjective “dystopian”, as an alternative to Jeremy Bentham’s “cacotopian,”1 in relation to the Irish question before the Commons in March 1868. What he characterized as dystopian was a policy which was “too bad to be practicable.”2 The word only became widely used in the late twentieth century, “and then mainly in secondary literature concentrating on contemporary texts” (Sargent 2010, 4; Claeys 2017, 273). The first scholarly studies to mention dystopia are Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick’s The Quest for Utopia (1952), where dystopia was defined as “the opposite of eutopia, the ideal society” (Claeys 2017, 274; original emphasis).
4Dystopia is best defined and studied in connection with a constellation of related concepts. The opposite of utopia, dystopia must be distinguished from its contrary, anti-utopia, which is an attack on utopian thought on the ground that “the idea of utopia itself is wrong and bad, and that any attempt to try to make things better is sure to wind up making things worse” (Robinson 2018, online). Such a definition of anti-utopia stands in contrast with that provided by William Golding. The latter saw it as stemming from a “sad knowledge” and a broken heart: “It gave the dying George Orwell no consolation to write Nineteen Eighty-Four as an illustration of the monstrous social thing that could happen when political theory and humanity are out of step. He knew it was happening, just across the road, so to speak, under Joseph Stalin.” What Golding calls Orwell’s “antiutopia” was “at once a cry for help and a cry of despair.” He adds that “[t]he antiutopian wants to be proved wrong” (Golding 1982, 182). Golding’s notion of antiutopia, as shall be seen further down, aligns with the dynamics of dystopia as understood in these pages. Clandfield’s contribution in this issue also draws on Umberto Eco’s concept of “metatopia” – which the latter developed in an article aptly published in 1984 – and applied to works which present realistic worlds which extrapolate from trends which are already present in the readers’ world.
5Lyman Tower Sargent includes dystopia under the umbrella term of “utopianism,” defined as “social dreaming.” (Sargent 1994, 3). In this context, utopian literature, both in its eutopian and dystopian manifestations, is “a subset of a broader phenomenon,” alongside “communitarianism” and “utopian social theory” (Sargent 1994, 4). While this issue is primarily devoted to literary dystopias, the communal and theoretical “faces” of utopianism are never far, since social organization is crucial in the works discussed by the different authors. Sean Mark’s piece in particular straddles the border between fiction and politics, showing how the language of dystopia pervaded the British government’s response to COVID-19 as well as the criticisms that were levelled at the latter. The contributions to this volume show how dystopia has developed into subgenres, such as the demodystopia discussed in Bray’s article, and been able to absorb new concerns, such as pollution and the interface with Artificial Intelligence, as apparent in Banerjee’s paper, while flirting with related genres such as science fiction or the more recent climate fiction, in a late capitalist context. Alternate history, “a sub-genre of science fiction which developed partly under the influence of historical ‘counterfactuals’ such as those collected by J.C. Squire in If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931)” and partly “through the ‘many worlds’ theory devised by the physicist Hugh Everett in 1957”, has also flourished in close connection with dystopia since 1984, as evidenced by Christopher Priest’s The Separation (2002) or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) (Birch and Hooper 2012). Such works take as their point of departure a world in which the outcome of, for instance, the Second World War is reversed and explore the ensuing consequences, prompting readers to assess the distance that separates their world from that described in the fiction. Dystopia has in fact become so omnipresent that Sean Mark suggests expanding it to qualify a dystopian culture.
- 3 Green discusses The Dead and the Gone (2008), by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and The Hunger Games (2008 for (...)
6The twenty-first century may well be regarded as the “golden age” of dystopia (Robinson 2018). Today’s younger generations enjoy watching series or reading novels that deal with dystopic political or post-apocalyptic situations. In 2009, John Green noted that, in the United States, “[t]he past year ha[d] seen the publication of more than a dozen post-apocalyptic young adult novels that explore what the future could look like once our unsustainable lifestyles cease to be sustained”3 (Green 2008). In Britain, the success of Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron (2007) and Sapphique (2008), to take but two examples, would seem to confirm the popularity of dystopia with the Young Adult public. Why this may be so and with what consequences is discussed further down.
7Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2009), Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017), or Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2019), constitute the most obvious body of recent evidence of a revival. Nor did well-established novelists hesitate to test their skills in the genre, including such widely diverse writers as Will Self (The Book of Dave, 2006), Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods, 2007), P.D. James (whose 1992 book The Children of Men is the focus of Bray’s article in this issue) or Kazuo Ishiguro, with Never Let Me Go (2005) or, more recently, Klara and the Sun (2021), which is discussed by Banerjee in this volume.
8Claeys suggests that dystopia has a natural affinity with the cinema, as “both are in love with high drama, exaggeration, and special effects” (Claeys 2017, 491), to which we may add TV Series such as Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2011-2019). Michael Radford’s 1984, released in 1984, was shortly followed by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). The dystopian cinema industry continues thriving, with for instance Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) or Yórgos Lánthimos’s The Lobster (2015). Dystopian novels have easily made it to the screen, as evidenced by Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), adapted from the above-mentioned novel by P.D. James, or Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2010). Nor are dystopian media limited to the novel and the cinema. Thus, Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, which is analysed in Wrobel’s contribution, was made into a play in 2019. Clandfield’s article includes a graphic novel, and studies of dystopias such as Lars Schmeink’s Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction (2016) feature video games.
9What is it that draws contemporary audiences to the dark worlds of dystopia? What – if anything – is there to learn from them? Does dystopia fulfil a didactic function or does it encourage its consumers to wallow in apathetic despair? These questions are crucial to the ongoing debate on the place of hope in literary dystopias. The interpretation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, while it may not lay the discussion to rest, may help us grasp the formal aspects of dystopian openness.
10While literary dystopias project bleak prospects, hope is not necessarily precluded. For Sargent, utopianism is “a tale of hope, hope engendered, hope deferred, and hope renewed” (Sargent 1994, 1; see also 8). Hope stems from the idea that “alternative modes of behavior are possible” (Sargent 1994, 8). Dystopia has indeed largely been understood as a didactic genre. Already in 1973, Robert O. Evans insisted that “a defining characteristic of the utopian genre must be a warning to the reader that something must and, by implication, can be done in the present to avoid the future” (Evans 1973, 33). More recently, Baccolini and Moylan have defined “the dystopian imagination” as “a prophetic vehicle, the canary in a cage, for writers with an ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside” (Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 1-2). They express their hope that these “thought experiments […] will support or catalyze a social transformation that will bring an end to the conditions that produced the twentieth-century dystopias” (Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 11).
11Jill Lepore, who notes that in the first month of the Donald Trump administration, Nineteen Eighty-Four “jumped to the top of the Amazon best-seller list” believes that dystopia, which used to be a “fiction of resistance,” had become a “fiction of submission” whose “only admonition is: Despair more” (Lepore 2017, on line). Commenting on the “blighted crop of dystopian novels” of the spring of 2017, she suggests literary dystopia, at least in its American version, is “used up” and that “the life of the genre got squeezed out.” Contemporary dystopias would thus be “anti-utopian” texts, in the sense that they are “compensatory, resigned, and anti-critical” (Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 8). Kim Stanley Robinson too sees dystopias as “fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent,” allowing readers to enjoy the “vicarious thrill” of characters struggling in dystopian environments, but also “a sense of comparative safety,” as their own world is supposedly not as bad as the ones they have read about. In Robinson’s analysis, contemporary dystopia therefore functions as “a kind of late-capitalist, advanced-nation schadenfreude about those unfortunate fictional citizens whose lives have been trashed by our own political inaction” (Robinson 2018, on line). The question is directly tackled in this issue by Clandfield, whose article references Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In the latter, Ghosh warns that dissatisfaction can become a “commodity” (quoted in Clandfield; see also Moylan 2020, 165). If that is the case, then it may be, as Robinson suggests, that the “dystopian structure of feeling” has been “captured” by neoliberal capitalism, and this is precisely the hypothesis that Sean Mark’s article explores in this issue.
12The question of whether dystopia has a potential for critique and the ability to activate readers is still debated, and the tension is reflected in the different positions adopted in the contributions to this volume. In any case, the ability to envision alternatives is crucial to avoid the pitfall of quietism. For Robinson, the dystopian moment is only acceptable if it acts as a trigger to prompt readers to work on creating a sustainable civilization, i.e. a form of utopia (Robinson 2018). Just as Clandfield’s article in this issue approaches literary dystopias as resources which can be a step towards a utopian horizon (working for “a better future”), Anais Hendricks’s fierce voice in The Panopticon may be read as a literary means to rouse readers from their apathy, just as the ambivalent ending prevents passive reading.
13Orwell was quite unambiguous as to the fact that his novel was meant to be a cautionary tale:
It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or something like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world. This is not correct. I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. […] The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you (Orwell 1998, 134; original emphasis).
14There is no consensus on whether Nineteen Eighty-Four warrants an optimistic interpretation. In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Moylan reads it as a “classic dystopia” which asserts a “militant pessimism,” because there is “no meaningful possibility of movement or resistance, much less radical change, embedded in any of the iconic elements of the text” (Moylan 2000, 162). He goes on to write that: “The brooding, faded, shabby, cruel, and paranoid society presided over by Big Brother and the Inner Party is the quintessence of the bad place in our time.” In his view, the fate of Winston and Julia simply says that no resistance is possible in Oceania (Moylan 2000, 161; see also Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 7). Claeys, who agrees that Nineteen Eighty-Four is “a book draped in the blackest black,” nevertheless suggests that this dark atmosphere may be a factor in the book’s success, and, more importantly, that such a reading “dismisses the author’s intentions outside the text” given that Orwell remained a socialist while writing it (Claeys 2017, 390, 282).
15Hope of course may not necessarily come from happy endings, but may persist in “ambiguous, open endings” which allow “both readers and protagonists to hope by resisting closure” (Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 7). Generic hybridity may have the same effect: in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling (2000), as well as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993), it is the very “notion of an impure genre, one with permeable borders that allow contamination from other genres” which “represents” – one may be tempted to add performs – “resistance to a hegemonic ideology” (Baccolini 2004, 520).
16Generic hybridity, which can be read as performing and fostering resistance, is already present in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which flirts with the love story and the detective novel. From the point of view of structure, hope comes from the fact that Oceania is a thing of the past. The hints at the regime’s possible instability which are scattered throughout the book are confirmed by the very existence of the appendix on Newspeak. This supplement which forestalls closure is characterized by a shift in tenses, with the use of the past – which tells us the regime has collapsed – as well as the “perfect continuous conditional” (Claeys 2017, 433). The effect of this tense, which Milner calls “subjunctive future perfect” is to “relativize dystopia by historicizing it” (Milner 2010, 6). While the horizon in Winston’s time was the replacement of Oldspeak by Newspeak, the appendix tells readers that it was never completed, which opens up the possibility that the whole Oceania regime has disappeared. This crack in a stifling text marked by a desperate, even tragic tone introduces an element of hope and optimism by “opening up again the possibility of a positive sense for History” (Regard 1994, 15; my translation).
17Even Moylan, for whom the “anti-utopian impulse” is dominant in Orwell’s novel, acknowledges that a “slim trace of hope in his text comes at the very end of the published volume”: “This self-reflexive ‘report’ on language and power stands analytically, cognitively outside the story of the dominant state, and it thus bespeaks a possible Other Place – one of present, satirical, critique if not future utopian opposition” (Moylan 2000, 162-163). Margaret Atwood adopted a similar strategy regarding the general structure of The Handmaid’s Tale. The last sentence of the tale itself is typically open-ended: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (Atwood 1996, 307), and is followed by “Historical Notes” which offer a “partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies” held in 2195. While the contents of Professor Pieixoto’s talk show that sexism has not disappeared, the fact that the Gilead regime has become an object of historical study means it no longer stands. Most literary dystopias may not necessarily use a similar structure, but they do produce effects which enable readers to take distance from the dystopian world, reopen time and get history on the move again.
- 4 The phrase “crystal spirit” is used in a text entitled “Looking Back on the Spanish War”. Orwell sa (...)
18What might the literary posterity of Nineteen Eighty-Four look like? What are the distinctive qualities of Orwell’s text that we may look for in contemporary dystopias? First, it is not science fiction; second, it focuses on a central consciousness, conveying an individual’s experience of dystopia, which endows it with an emotional intensity that counterbalances the realistic style. The individual is a dystopian rebel who attempts to challenge the system. Focusing on one character and his or her consciousness makes it possible to give historical depth and put the dystopian present in perspective, through embedded narratives and flashbacks. The drive for rebellion comes from an inner place, or “crystal spirit,”4 which can work as a sanctuary (as in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon) or be denied entirely (as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun). The central characters necessarily have a limited vision and may prove unreliable.
19First, then, Orwell does not write science fiction. His relation to time is entirely at odds with that of other classic dystopias such as Zamyatin’s We (1920-1921, 1924 for the English version) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Orwell describes London in 1948, and the future he describes is plausible, it is not a “surreal, implausible futuristic world” (Regard 1994, 77; my translation). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, “the science is not so wildly improbable as not to be an extrapolation of existing trends” (Claeys 2017, 289). Orwell thus anticipates what Claeys calls the “Atwood principle” of dystopian realism. While the border between dystopia and science fiction may sometimes seem porous, the degree of emphasis on social aspects may help distinguish between the two. Indeed, the questions of social and political organization which are often central to utopia and dystopia are only peripheral in science fiction. Claeys points out that “robots, cyborgs and androids, once fictional, now actually exist,” and that “[f]or dystopia, the question is not what the science produces, but its negative impact on humanity.” Thus, “the issue is not whether we imagine ray guns, infinite power sources, or space travel. It is whether we use them as instruments of oppression and destruction” (Claeys 2017, 286). All the works discussed in this issue share this commitment to realism, and none are instances of science fiction.
20Within this plausible setting, dystopian fiction tends to focus on a protagonist of whom Winston Smith may be regarded as the archetype. Indeed, dystopian literature is “always about an individual, or several individuals; never the story of a generalized mass” (Atwood 2005, 93). Dystopia thereby “bring[s] home at the individual, emotional level experiences which, writ large, are meaningless when lost in the anonymity of historical narrative” (Claeys 2017, 269). Bode reminds us that there are four kinds of text in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the third-person, authorial narration present in most of the novel; the extracts from Winston Smith’s diary, written in the first person; excerpts from Goldstein’s Book; and the appendix entitled “The Principles of Newspeak” (Bode 2019, 26). The first two are based on a narratological setup which allows readers to adopt Winston Smith’s perspective. Similarly, P.D. James’ The Children of Men is characterized by an alternation between third-person narration and Theo’s diary, written in the first person. Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon and 1982, Janine are both written in the first person. The desire to allow readers to share the dystopian protagonist’s perspective thus dictates narratological choices.
21Winston Smith may be regarded as a “parody of the Romantic hero who rebels against the established authority” (Regard 1994, 43; my translation). The dystopian rebel at the heart of a counter-narrative remains a key feature in recent production, as evidenced by Cait and Dan in IDP: 2043 (studied in Clandfield’s article) or Anais Hendricks in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (discussed in Wrobel’s contribution). In this respect, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun offers an interesting counter-example. The story is narrated from the point of view of the Artificial Friend [AF]. Its vision is literally different from human vision, as described in passages which convey the AF’s fragmented perception of its surroundings, in squares and rectangles. Moreover, the AF has been trained, even possibly programmed, to be docile and has no other desire but to fulfil its duties. The novel begins “when [the AFs] were new” and ends as the discarded AF awaits its “slow fade” in a junkyard. The AF has a very limited individual memory and no sense of history.
22Readers of dystopias are often plunged directly in the dystopian world (Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 5; Claeys 2017, 485), so that the focus on one character makes it possible, especially through flashbacks, to get a sense of how the dystopia was established. Questions of reliability, however, inevitably arise. Indeed, Winston Smith turns out to be an unreliable focal character, for whom the distinction between actual and imagined memories has become blurry, precisely because of the party’s constant rewriting of the past. Thus it may be argued that “[t]he central theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the fragility of memory” and that Orwell’s “most powerful plea is […] for the balanced writing of history” (Claeys 2017, 413). Individual and collective historiography are still central to dystopia, and inextricably linked. As the contributions to this volume show, who owns the narrative and how the latter is written are stakes which are just as essential now as they were in Orwell’s time. The questions of language, individual and collective memory, history and historiography, have undeniably persisted. What thematic changes, additions, or inflections may nevertheless be identified in contemporary British literary dystopia?
23The most important wave of English-language utopian/dystopian writing took place between 1875 and 1914. While the nineteenth century was the heyday of eutopian writing, the post-World War II period was dominated by dystopia, reflecting “pessimism about the ability of the human race to achieve a better society,” and offering a “warning that things could get even worse” (Sargent 1994, 26; Baccolini and Moylan 2013, 1). While the Second World War and the experience of totalitarianism clearly constitute a watershed, one should not however underestimate the importance of earlier texts. H. G. Wells’s novels, in particular, are still a major source of inspiration for contemporary dystopia, in literature as well as in film – whether one is looking at The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), or The War of the Worlds (1898). Issues such as the ethics of science, race relations, social hierarchies, or the limits between the human and the non-human are already there, presented in a revolutionary way. Other landmarks in the first half of the twentieth century include E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) or the already mentioned We and Brave New World. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four stands as an example of the classical, or canonical form of dystopia in the continuity of these earlier works and on a par with later iconic works of the British dystopian tradition such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962).
24Nineteen Eighty-Four is typical of the political dystopia, which portrays “regimes characterized by extreme suffering, fear, and oppression” (Claeys 2017, 270), and is usually distinguished from the post-apocalyptic dystopia, which lays the emphasis “on a variety of other huge world-changing events, such as plague, World War III, cataclysmic asteroid crashes, or even zombies,” and of which Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) may be regarded as emblematic (Basu, Broad and Hintz 2013, 3). In its portrayal of “an extremely negative or evil fictional state usually dominated by fear,” Nineteen Eighty-Four remains paradigmatic (Claeys 2017, 7). According to Claeys, anxiety about totalitarianism has receded since then, and the “post-totalitarian dystopia” which appeared after 1950 is dominated by five themes: the nuclear threat, the “spectre of environmental degeneration,” increased “subordination of people to machines” and “blurring of human/machine identity,” “enslavement to a mindless ethos of hedonistic consumption,” and anxiety connected to the “War on Terror” (Claeys 2017, 447). However, the fear of totalitarianism still seems to be very much present in contemporary dystopias, in forms which often combine political, environmental and technological factors. This toxic combination is what makes the advent of new forms of totalitarianism possible, but these conditions are also controlled and manipulated by those who have gained power thanks to them and intend to keep their privileges. Most of the dystopian texts studied in this issue thus target late capitalism as a force that devours humans and nature.
25Population control and management – often conducted in authoritarian ways – are a constant concern of dystopias, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its Anti-Sex League, is no exception. Utopian literature, whether in its eutopian or dystopian versions, always makes provisions about reproduction, sexual practices, children’s education, eugenics and, in some cases, modern biotechnologies. As such, the genre constitutes a privileged locus to observe the functioning of biopower, a notion which Foucault introduced along with the related term of biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), and which he further developed in his lecture series, Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978). If biopower, for Foucault emerged in the eighteenth century, the time of its ascendancy was the late twentieth century, which corresponds to the rise of dystopia in literature. Foucault’s reflection on biopower has been prolonged and amended by authors such as Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, the latter arguing that biopolitical production is now the main focus of power (Henman 2011, 73).
26When it comes to demographics, literary dystopia has been ridden by contradictory fears of overpopulation and extinction. Aldous Huxley worried in 1950 that the world might reach three billion before stabilizing, hence the focus on birth control in Brave New World. Such fears of overpopulation exhausting common resources are also apparent in Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (the 1966 American novel which provided the basis for the film Soylent Green, 1973) or Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962). On the other hand, the extinction of the human race through its inability to reproduce is also a recurrent scenario, which has been tackled in a specific subgenre, the demodystopia – a type of dystopia brought about by demographic change and/or in which population is a central concern, represented here by P. D. James’s Children of Men. Between the poles of overpopulation and extinction lies the question of management, which is taking new directions with the advent of biotechnologies and the promises and threats of genetic engineering. A work like Klara and the Sun makes it possible to ask who will have access to such technologies – and who will be denied it.
27The articles gathered here give an idea of some of the new concerns which have emerged in dystopias at the turn of the twenty-first century, and which are rarely discussed in isolation. For instance, Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun depicts a near future which combines genetic enhancement reserved for an elite, the growing presence of androids and looming environmental disaster, with deadly levels of pollution and the prospect of the exhaustion of earthly resources. In a comparable fashion, the novels discussed in Clandfield’s piece show Scotland coping with the neoliberal exploitation of climate change. However, it is not so much the environmental disaster that concerns the dystopian novel, but rather how society responds to it. Increased state authoritarianism seems likely in the face of large-scale disasters, and the restrictions on freedom of movement, even in liberal democracies, including in the extreme form of lockdown as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have only confirmed this scenario, which is discussed in Sean’s article. If the “great worry of the twentieth century” was “totalitarian dictatorship,” contemporary dystopias depict the destruction of centralized states by “neo-liberal ideological assaults” and the advent of “plutocratic dystopias” in which the wealthy are able to “retreat into enclaves, leaving most of humanity to their unfortunate fate” (Claeys 2017, 439). The fear of “plutocratic post-statist orders which abandon most of us to crime, disease, hunger, and global warming” is precisely what the dystopias studied by Clandfield explore (Claeys 2017, 439).
28Climate change, a concern which is of course not to be found in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is almost invariably a component of the dystopias written since 1984, which function in “synergy” with climate-fiction (Moylan 2020). The latter was defined by environmentalist Dan Bloom in 2008 to refer to post-apocalyptic narratives in which a small group of characters struggle to survive in an environment which has been devastated by climate change. In climate fiction as in dystopia more generally, the social and political aspects both in the human responsibility and in the human response are foregrounded:
Climate fiction reaches into several different genres and is identifiable in its dramatizing of issues such as deforestation, pollution, climate change, sustainability, animal welfare […], the rights of indigenous peoples, the sins of capitalism, the equitable care and allocation of resources, and the oppression of women and ethnic minorities to create a self-contained “ecosystem” of oppression (Di Paolo 2018, 8).
29Dystopia seems to be a privileged fictional medium to confront “the transiting of humans from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, a transition that forces our species to come to grips with the enormous consequences of anthropogenic, planet-wide climate change” (Marzec 2019, 338). The term Anthropocene first appeared in a paper entitled “The Anthropocene”, co-authored by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and published in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter in May 2000. The authors “noted that many forms of human activity are now capable of undermining the natural environment” (D’Almeida Martins 2012). Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article entitled “Geology of Mankind” in the journal Nature, dating the beginning of the Anthropocene to the second half of the eighteenth century and the Industrial revolution. The Anthropocene thus refers to a geological era in which human activity is changing the Earth on an unprecedented scale, and with permanent consequences. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson have “underscore[d] the importance of situating the Anthropocene, which is generally understood exclusively in terms of ecological matters, within [a] broader military, economic, and technological framework” (Marzec 2019, 340).
30The fear of abandonment and isolation may be the link between the dystopias brought together by the contributions to this issue: from Jenni Fagan’s orphaned protagonist on whom the British State has given up to the underprivileged in the dystopias studied by Clandfield; from the prospect of being the last human on earth in The Children of Men to the image of the humanoid AF who is denied humanity and left to meet its “slow fade” in a junkyard at the end of Klara and the Sun. The precarity of the AF’s hierarchical positions echoes the precarity of Anais Hendricks and the other children and teenagers she lives with at the youth care unit. Taken together, the texts discussed in the articles raise ethical issues which are likely to gain urgency in the coming years, whether it be the actual meaning of care (as in the first article), intergenerational relationships (with the question of legacy, transmission, accountability), or the human/non-human border (humans as one type of animal among others, humans in their interactions with machines, but also the selective recognition of humanity in fellow-beings). The danger that the contributions highlight is that of apathy. Whether dystopia – as a literary tradition, a fictional genre, or even a culture – fosters or counters it remains an open question.
31In the first article, entitled “Privatized Futures, Climate Control, and Resistance in Recent Scottish Dystopian Fiction,” Peter Clandfield takes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a starting point, tracing its legacy in Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine (published in 1984). This novel picks up where Orwell’s novel left off, so to speak, as it focuses on a central character – Kock MacLeish – who, like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, has been crushed by the system and uses alcohol as a palliative. In this case, the dystopian environment is 1980s Britain. The protagonist decides to quit his job at the National Security Limited and to “work for a better future.” Clandfield shows how, in this work and in later Scottish dystopias, a “better future” is not a given, and how the British state is no longer seen as “the main source of problems affecting Scotland.” The fact that Scotland stands on its own materializes on the fictional stage in the disappearance of England (often in the wake of climate upheaval), and in the choice of Scots – or Scots-derived languages – in the writing. The later novels he discusses affirm Scotland as a nation with global concerns – environmental disaster, the greedy commodification of resources, corporate authoritarianism. They deal with these issues in metatopian fashion, i.e. rather than staging a post-apocalyptic future, they extrapolate trends which are already present and develop them in a plausible near future. In this context, the novels examined – which include Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000), John Aberdein’s Strip the Willow (2009) and a multiple-author graphic novel entitled IDP: 2043 (2014) – foreground dystopian protagonists who try and rebel against the overlords who rule their worlds, and embody active resistance, even if it is not suggested that heroic individual actions are the way out of the dystopian problems. The article thus addresses the question of hope in dystopia, and shows how by developing “a foreboding narrative of possible futures for Scotland and the planet”, the novels “complicate utopian narratives treating Scottish autonomy and sustainability as naturally linked.”
32Hope is explicitly thematized in the second contribution to this issue, entitled “‘Where Does My Hope Come From?’: P. D. James’s The Children of Men as a Christian Dystopia in the Context of the Late 20th Century Demographic Crisis,” by Suzanne Bray. The article highlights the central ethical questions raised by a scenario in which humanity is plagued with infertility and dwindling to extinction: what can give people hope and a reason to live in such an ageing world? In the absence of hope, human rights, traditional liberties and ethical standards have been abandoned, and these are precisely the conditions which have made it possible for a totalitarian dictatorship to take hold. The article locates the novel in the debate on male fertility before and after the millennium, but also reads it in light of P.D. James’ Anglicanism. Bray traces Christian motifs, scenes and language in the novel and shows how its structure is based on the premise of hope, leading to the possibility of a new beginning and turning the novel into a Christian fable. She locates P.D. James within a long Christian literary tradition in the depiction of a humanity without faith, hope, or belief in eternity. But the article also shows that P.D. James uses dystopia as a vehicle to criticize some tendencies in the Christian culture of her day. Ultimately, hope is embodied in a trinity of characters whose faith enables them to rise above the general despair and, for two of them, to conceive a baby. Bray reads the novel as the demonstration of St Paul’s claim that hope is inseparable from faith and love, and concludes that “it is not from destruction that James’s dystopian world needs saving, but from suicide.”
33Ethical questions are also brought to the fore in the third article, by Agnibha Banerjee, entitled “‘Just Fabric’: Becoming Black of the (Post)Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021).” As what was once science fiction becomes possible, a significant number of dystopias depict scientific and technical advancement. The perspective adopted in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is not that of the potential domination of humanity by machines, but rather that of the ethical issues raised by humans’ interactions with and treatment of their own creatures – in this case, Artificial Friends [AFs]. As Banerjee reminds us, it is human societies that define what “human” encompasses, and who is excluded from it. He draws a parallel between AFs and slaves because “their existence is reduced to their disposable utility,” and their exploitation is premised on their exclusion from the “human” category, a mechanism which is also laid bare in dystopian novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2005), Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2009), McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2010). Although the ontological status of the AF is problematic, and raises ethical questions, these questions are not asked. Banerjee uses Achille Mbembe’s concept of the “becoming black of the world” to investigate the construction of “posthuman” races through technological development, showing how “[h]umans and non-humans alike are subsumed into the appropriative logic of racial capitalism.” What is exposed is the “neoliberal late-capitalist episteme” which commodifies not only its creatures, but also affect and human life itself. The novel lays bare the “networks of power, profit, and neocolonial privilege that underlie the field of AI [Artificial Intelligence] research and implementation,” and shows that AI is an “extractive industry” with “devastating ecological impact.” Dystopia provides “Ishiguro with a dynamic literary field for playing out the precarity and contradictions underlying these desires, fantasies, and anxieties [surrounding artificial intelligence and robotics as well as genomics and biotechnology].” While Orwell voiced concerns with the increasing mechanization and dehumanization of the human under a totalitarian regime, “Ishiguro explores the violence perpetuated in the name of safeguarding the so-called sanctity of the human at a time when authoritarianism is fragmented and distributed through ruthless neoliberal techno-capitalist systems.”
34Claire Wrobel’s article, entitled “Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012),” starts from the observation that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s cultural significance did not end with the fall of the Berlin wall. In public discourse, if not in literature, the adjective “Orwellian” and the phrase “Big Brother” are still associated with mass state surveillance. In the field of surveillance studies, Big Brother’s main competitor is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a model-prison designed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as mediated by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975; 1977 for the English translation). While Jenni Fagan explicitly gestured to Bentham’s scheme and Foucault’s conceptualization in the title of her début novel, the article shows that reintroducing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the discussion and regarding its protagonist, Anais Hendricks, as a dystopian protagonist in the vein of Winston Smith can be illuminating. Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) does not qualify as a classic dystopia detailing a possible and undesirable future state of society, as it is located in contemporary Britain. Its dystopian streak comes from the fact that it focuses on a marginal population that mainstream society usually prefers to ignore and lock away – juvenile delinquents, abused children, minors who have been exposed to, and themselves produce, shockingly high levels of violence. The dystopian space par excellence seems to be that delimited by the walls of the Panopticon, here an institution for young delinquents, which finds a counterpoint in the shape of an island utopia. However, panoptic space, contrary to what is asserted in the text, is not subjected to omnipresent and omniscient surveillance. Rather, readers find a literal space which is rich in nooks and crannies and a literary space which reveals intertextual depth. The virulent critique it levels at the welfare state echoes some of the central issues to be found in George Orwell’s attack on totalitarian states, particularly those related to memory and language. The adoption of a first-person narrator allows Fagan to speak out against a dehumanizing institutional discourse and a one-sided surveillance that consists in control only.
35The concluding piece in this issue leaves the realm of dystopian fiction per se to explore the dystopian culture which consumes it. Sean Mark’s article, entitled “Coda – Pandemic Fictions: Covid-19 and the Cultures of Dystopia,” takes stock of recent crises in Britain – the COVID-19 pandemic but also Brexit – and questions “the ways in which cultural representations grouped under the broad umbrella of the dystopian have shaped the understanding of and response to the COVID-19 crisis.” For Mark, we have left the stage of late capitalism to enter a “more advanced and deregulated stage of predatory capitalism,” of which dystopia is the culture. Dystopia is here understood as “a loose category – as a genre, type of thought or broad cultural imaginary” which blurs the border between the dystopian and post-apocalyptic. The article investigates dystopian tropes and figurations which helped conceptualise the COVID-19 crisis, shaped the government’s response, and were used in public discourse to criticize the enforcement of restrictive measures. As Mark reminds us, similarities with the totalitarian regime from Nineteen Eighty-Four were then underlined. As often in dystopias, what matters is not so much the plague – or combination of plagues – that befalls humanity, but the response, which “is always political.” The failures in the British government’s handling of the pandemic have according to Mark exposed “the ruthlessness of the political culture of neoliberalism.” The management of the health crisis would seem to have completed the “total bureaucratization” which David Graeber defines as the “fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits”. The question of hope is also central in this final article. Mark claims that if the crisis is “dystopian,” it is precisely through “the loss of impulses and discourses that challenge the status quo,” a general sense of inertia and apathy which has not been countered by complacent British media and which constitutes a dystopian “state of mind.” The last part of the essay reflects on the work we ask of culture in a time of crisis. Orwell resurfaces here, as Mark notes “apparently meaningful collisions of fiction and reality.” Do works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four simply help soften “the disquieting blow of the real” and offer solace, maybe escapism? Does their apparent prescience give them intrinsic value? Isn’t the attempt to place a figure on the value of culture a way of competing with neoliberalism? The article ends on a speculation regarding the effect of COVID-19 on the general acceptance of capitalism and on dystopian culture, noting that “there may yet be something salutary in its representations.”