In this multi-post series, we hope to answer some of your questions about different genre fiction. Throughout GENRE FICTION 101, you’ll learn about different genres and their place in the publishing world. We’ll discuss popularity, profits, typical tropes, controversies, and more. Read the intro installment here.

What is Dystopian Fiction?

Dystopian fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that imagines a future society in decay. Its protagonists typically face environmental decline, an oppressive government, terrifying political climates, or immoral scientific advancement. Through this fictional society, authors of dystopian fiction examine and critique social and political structures.

The word “dystopia” is meant to resemble the Ancient Greek, δυσ-τόπος, meaning “unhappy country.” It’s an antonym to Sir Thomas More’s “utopia,” a play on Ancient Greek language that simultaneously means “good place” and “no place.” In fiction, utopians believe in progress and offer promises about the future, while dystopias create warnings about possible future social and political practices.

Dystopias can be apocalyptic in nature (and they often overlap with apocalyptic fiction), but dystopian fiction is a distinct form. Many of these imagined societies occur pre-apocalypse.

One newer branch of the dystopian genre is ecotopian fiction, in which fictional societies revolve around environmental conservation or destruction. Ecotopian fiction is sometimes called climate fiction or “cli fi.”

While some readers view dystopian novels as nothing but “doom and gloom,” something about the imaginative worlds and biting critique of social and political structures makes this genre successful. The genre has produced several popular books, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Lois Lowry’s The Giver, to name a few. Dystopian novels are frequently taught in the classroom, make best-seller lists, and inspire film adaptations.

Common Themes

Since dystopian fiction imagines societal decay, it’s not surprising that people can break down the genre into just five common themes. The following themes reveal general concerns dystopian fiction writers have about social and political structures that they explore in their fiction.

1. Government Control: Since the genre examines politics, it makes sense that many of these novels have an oppressive government, or—in some cases—no government at all.

2. Environmental Destruction: These books invite us to consider the way we care for our planet and imagine what might happen if we don’t improve our environmental habits.

3. Advanced Science or Technology: Many books use advanced science or technology as a tool that the oppressive powers use to control (and sometimes distract) its people.

4. Survival: With controlling governments or uninhabitable environments, most of these books address the protagonist’s struggle to survive, highlighting the severity of the dystopian landscape.

5. Dangers of Conformity: Some of these novels address the conflict between societal and individual needs. Others ask readers to imagine how giving up one’s individuality and conforming to societal ideologies could be dangerous.

Susceptibility to Current Events

All fiction is influenced by current events to some extent, but this is perhaps most apparent in dystopian fiction. Dystopian writers react to current political and social climates to craft warnings about society, and, because of this, the genre is incredibly susceptible to world events.

Origin of Reactivity

In fact, the very beginning of this genre was the consequence of authors’ reactive behavior. The genre emerged as a response to the invention of utopian novels that imagine perfect societies. For example, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward—an 1888 novel that inspired the creation of several utopian communities—prompted dystopian author Arthur Dudley Vinton to write Looking Further Backward and Richard C. Michaelis to write Looking Further Forward. These “sequel” novels are just two of the several books that authors published that add to Bellamy’s storyline to critique his political ideas.

Political and Social Influence

Beyond its response to utopian depictions, we can see that dystopian fiction also responds to current political and social events. Many dystopian novels work to critique communism, eugenicists, and fascism. For example, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 We, Aldous Huxley’s 1935 Brave New World, Ayn Rand’s 1837 Anthem, and George Orwell’s 1949 1984 are each highly influenced by the political tensions of their time.

In the second half of the twentieth century, we begin to see many dystopian novels that respond to concerns about pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, and the misuse of science. Again, dystopian fiction is keeping up with the times by responding to public conversations about environmentalism and politics.

Politics doesn’t simply influence dystopian fiction authors; it also impacts dystopian fiction readers. This is very apparent when looking at book sales during American presidential inaugurations. For example, during the first year of Obama’s presidency, Americans bought half a million copies of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. More impressively, during the first month of Trump’s presidency, sales for Orwell’s 1984 shot up almost 10,000%.

Publishing Industry Effects

The publishing industry, of course, also has a large influence on this genre’s success. For example, dystopian fiction used to be generally targeted at adult audiences to encourage the exploration of their political ideologies. However, dystopian fiction is commonly associated with young adult fiction nowadays. (Think of The Hunger Games, Ready Player One, Divergent, Uglies, Among the Hidden, The Maze Runner, The Host, Feed, and The Fifth Wave.) As New Yorker writer Jill Lepore explains, this sudden burst of young adult dystopian fiction was a publishing industry invention. She writes that dystopian novels with teenage protagonists “only really took off in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished, and the publishing industry began producing fiction packaged for ‘young adults,’ ages twelve to eighteen.”

It goes without saying that COVID-19 is a pressing current event, one that seems dystopian in its own way. So, how might the virus impact the publishing industry’s production of dystopian fiction?

Harper editor Sara Nelson announced, “I don’t generally buy dystopian fiction anyway, but I am pretty sure I won’t find dystopian novels appealing for the near future.” Similarly, Peter Steinberg, an agent at Foundry Literary + Media says “When there’s an unexpected shift in society, I think it has an almost real-time effect on editors’ buying habits. Because of the overwhelming nature of Covid-19, escapism is one of the better ways to elicit those intense emotions.”

Not everyone agrees with this sentiment though. For example, Writers House agent Johanna Castillo believes that, instead wanting to escape reality entirely, some readers might want “the inverse—a desire to imagine a future, with a dystopian society that takes on a plague . . . There is a reason why the movie Contagion was the number-one downloaded movie in February.”

It might be unclear at the moment how the current pandemic will impact this genre, but the history of this genre seems to suggest that the virus will influence the genre in some ways.

Why Do We Read Dystopian Fiction?

This genre asks readers to suspend disbelief and embrace their imagination as they explore the dark corners of a new society. The make-believe stories create an interesting way to challenge ideas about government and human behavior. We love to root for a protagonist who rebels against our social and political fears. Further, imagining worlds in worse-case scenarios opens up an entire landscape of ethically gray areas to explore. These books create an opportunity to “flirt” with questions of immorality, ideologies, and social norms in fictional societies that often reflect the fears we have about our very real world.