49 DYSTOPIA Graham J. Murphy Dystopia, the negative utopia, is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contem- poraneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived” (Sargent 1994: 9). It isnot the evacuation of eutopian hope (that belongs to the anti-utopia, which “has steadily attacked and refused Utopia and all that its authors claim for it” (Moylan 2000: 122)), but rather “draws on the more detailed systemic atives by way of an inversion that focuses on the terrors rather accounts of utopian né than the hopes of history” (Moylan 2000: 111) and works “not to undermine Utopia but rather to make room for its reconsideration and refunctioning in even the worst of times" (Moylan 2000: 133). This dystopian inversion did appear in the late nineteenth century — in Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millis (1879), H.C. Marriott-Watson’s Evchomenon (1879), Walker Besant’s The Revolt of Man (1882) and The Inner House (1888), H.G. Wells's “A Story of Days to Come” (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) (Stableford 1993: 360) — and some might nowadays view the social collectivism of eutopias such as Thomas More's Utopia (1516) or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 20001887 (1888) as dystopian. However, E.M. Forster's “The Machine Stops” (1909), in which humanity has retreated to vast subterranean cities run by the Machine, has the strongest claim to being dystopia's originary text, Its depiction of a totalizing adminis- tration that ‘mechanizes' every dimension of daily life (from the organization of nature and industry to the standardization of the person) ... develops an abstract yet critical account of the new social spacetime of the twentieth century” (Moylan 2000: 111). It opens with Vasht, listening to music and breathing fresh air pumped into her room ‘The opening lines ~ “Imagine, if you ean, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee” (Forster 1988: 41) evoke both the dehumanization of living like an insect and the confinement of a (jail) cell. Vashti is a “swaddled lump of flesh” with “face as white as a fungus” (Forster 1988: 41). Although “[itis to her that the little room belongs” (Forster 1988: 41), ic becomes apparent that she belongs to it Reluctantly visiting her son Kuno, she is perpetually shocked by the “horror of direct experience” (Forster 1988: 46). Kuno, however, longs for such experience and clandestinely visits the Earth's surface, where he discovers that the Machine has been lying about the planet's inhospitability: it is habitable and there are surface-dwellingGRAHAM J. MURPHY hhumans. Kuno concludes “it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine” (Forster 1988: 54). When the Machine begins to break down, humanity is left suffocating, buried alive undemeath modernity’s technological detritus. The real hope in this dystopian nightmare about technological dependency, dehumanization, and the sacrifice of ideas, resides not in those humans living on the surface but with the reader. It compels the reader to prevent its realization, Key early dystopias include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s critique of totalitarian ration- alization in We (written 1920, translated into English 1924), Aldous Huxley's condemnation of consumer capitalism in Brave New World (1932), and George ‘Onwell’s censure of nightmarish government power in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Despite their differing political foci, parallels among these classic dystopias abound: ‘wars facilitate dystopia's ascendancy; protagonists endure some trial of their newfound beliefs; women, love, and carnal desire motivate resistance; language is both an oppressive and liberating took; quasi-religious rituals are prominent; and utopianism is pushed to the very brink of darkness. We depicts the One State as a wondrous glass metropolis that has eliminated privacy. Names have been replaced by numbers, and in that reduction “people lose theie identity and are no longer unique or irreplaceable: in the world created by and for the machine, human beings become redundant” {Gottlieb 2001: 57). D-503, a mathematician, is predicated on logic and equations but haunted by uncertainty: the wonders of spring interfere “to some extent with the flow of logical thought” (Zamyatin 1972: 3); and, “in the eyes, or in the eyebrows" of 0-90, a contracted sexual partner, he finds “a certain strange, itritating X, which [he] could not capture, could not define in figures” (Zamyatin 1972: 6). We “pulls no punches in pessimistically describing the extensive power of the One State to put down individual and collective resistance” (Moylan 2000: 160); but various narrative strategies ~ such as casting the novel as D-503's diary, which survives beyond the One State's political control = signal a “strong ... utopian stance” (Moylan 2000: 161). Brave New World likewise pulls no punches in its critique of consumer capitalism, Fordism, and Taylorism, The World State, c. 2540 or After Ford 632, maintains social stability though strict eugenies and class hierarchy, the abolition of private property and independence, systematic consumption of the drug soma, and mandatory participation in sexual exhaustion and other distractions. But resistance bubbles forth. Bernard Mars, an Alpha Plus “eight centimetses short of the standard Alpha height” (Huxley 1994: 57), suffers rom alienation and loneliness, while Helmholtz Watson is equally alienated because ofa “mental excess" (Huxley 1994: 60) and poetic spirit that defies logic. John the Savage, a child raised on a “primitive” Reservation and on a diet of Shakespearean ddrama that repeatedly frames his experiences, returns to the World State only to resist its seductions. Ultimately, Marx and Watson are exiled and John, in an act of despair and defiance, hangs himself. Nevertheless, itis these poetic and alienated sensibilities that form the crux of Huxley's critique of unrestrained capitalism. Nineteen Eighty-Four, in its “indictment of che deep tendency of modern, techno- logically sophisticated governments to manage reality, and as a further devastating assault upon the actual situation of the USSR in 1948,” remains “unmatched!” in its pessimism that is “both distressing and salutary. Its understanding of the nightmare of 414pysTOPLA, power when wielded by representatives of a species which had evolved beyond the constraints of mercy ~ was definitive” (Clute 1993: 896). The inhabitants of Oceania are under constant observation or threat of observation by Big Brother, leaving protag onist Winston Smith nothing of himself but the interiority of his own mind, The ubiquitous sloganeering professing Big Brother's benevolence, the perpetual surveil- lance which requires one to avoid committing “faccerime” and “thoughterime” and to leam “doublethink,” and even the threat posed by one’s own children make those few centimeters a central battlefield. Oceania’s citizens are repressed by a calcified and hierarchically organized regime. Smith is employed to purge factual evidence that contradicts Big Brother's official accounts of history or social policy: he drops such traces down a memory hole to be “whitled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building” (Orwell 1990: 40). Smith faces a similar fate: at the end of the novel, afer his rebel- Tious streak is excised through torture and brainwashing, he sits at the Chestnut Tree Café contemplating the wonders of Big Brother, but the reader knows this is merely the final stop before Big Brother drops Smith down its own memory hole. Nonetheless, Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with a slim glimmer of hope: an appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” which seems to have been written after the end of Big Brother (Margaret Atwood deploys a similar tactic in The Handmaid's Tale (1985)). ‘After the Second World War, the distinctions between utopian and sf texts collapsed as “the dystopian sensibility found a larger and mote diffuse scope in the popular form of sf" and as sf “worked within an increasing enclosure of the lived moment and drew upon the dystopian sensibility even when its stories and novels ‘were not fully cast in the classical dystopian form” (Moylan 2000: 166, 168). Moylan points to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Kure Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Bemard Wolfe's Limbo (1952), and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) as sf texts that were distinetly dystopian, and to J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John Brunner as authors who worked “loosely with the spirit of the dystopia and produced tales of social nightmares that cannot be reduced to the strict parameters of dystopian narrative” (Moylan 2000: 168) By the end of the twentieth century, this shared literary terrain coalesced into the critical dystopia, which tends “to be less driven by extremes of celebration or despair, more open to complexities and ambiguities, and more encouraging of new riffs of personal and political maneuvers" (Moylan 2000: 182). While using dystopia's traditional tropes, they “go on to explore ways to change the present system so that culturally and economically marginalized peoples not only survive but also try to move toward creating a social reality that is shaped by an impulse to human self- determination and ecological health rather than one constricted by the narrow and destructive logic of a system intent only on enhancing competition in order to gain more profit for a select few” (Moylan 2000: 189). Such critical dystopias include Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast (1988), Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It (1991), and Octavia E, Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), Samuel Delany's Dhalgren (1975), Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers (1987) and Synners (1991), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling (2000), 415GRAHAM J. MURPHY He, She, and It locates resistance in Tikva, an enclave (albeit a dangerous one under constant threat of attack) away from the dystopian cities of the multis and the disease-ridden Glop. Tikva teaches “back to the models of early American town hall government, New Left participatory democracy, feminist principles of equity and self-criticism, and the socialism of early Zionism ... Valuing optimal freedom for everyone, the citizens practice a total democracy that requires endless meetings ... and community duties such as town labor and reforestation work” (Moylan 2000: 253-4). “Against this backdrop, He, She, and It is cast as a family narrative: there isa love story between Shira and Yod, an android clandestinely built by Gadi, Shira's former lover, to protect Tikva from aggressive corporate raids; the elderly matriarch Malkah uses the story of the golem of Prague to educate Yod; and, from out of the irradiated lands of Palestine, Riva, Shira’s outlaw data pirate mother (and Malkah’s daughter), returns to ‘Tikva with her eyborg lover, Nili. Moylan concludes that in “Pierey’s critical dystopia, the present social order is unflinchingly portrayed through the distancing Tens of its imagined alternative, but in this case the story of the people who stand up to the comporate order leads to the possibility of an eventual utopian transformation of that order ... The social and aesthetic value of such a text therefore lies in the emphasis it places on the process of reaching toward Utopia and on the values and policies required for that process to move in a progressive direction” (Moylan 2000: 272). ‘The dystopian sensibility is also prevalent in comic books and graphic novels. Alan, Moote has been at the foreftont of the utopian graphic novel with V for Vendetta (1982-5, 1988), Marvelman (aka Miracleman; 1982) and Watchmen (1986-1). (Also of interest are: Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme (1985-6); Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and The Dark Knight Soikes Again (2001-2); Enki Bilal’s Nikopol trilogy (1980-92); Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetvopolitan (1997-2003); Warren Ellis and Mark Millar's The Authority (1999-2002); Robert Venditi and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates (2006); and Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Daniel Acuifa’s Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters (2006-7).) Watchmen exemplifies the narrative possibilities and che types of critique comics can stage vis-2-vis utopian studies. Set in a Cold War era alternative US, five minutes from ‘humanity's nuclear midnight, it follows past and present supetheroes as they untangle the complicated plot surrounding the murder of one of their own, the violent and at times sadistic Comedian, Ultimately, Rorschach, Nite-Owl, Dr Manhattan, and Silk Spectre discover that his death was simply an accidental by-product of a plot by another superhero, Ozymandias, who has decided to solve the dystopian terrors of his age by precipitating (e)utopia. When his fabricated alien invasion destroys half of New York, the world’s citizens ignore their differences and reverse the Doomsday Clock. “I did it,” he proclaims, “I saved Earth from hell. Next, I'll help her towards Utopia” (Moore and Gibbons 1987, no. 12: 19-20). Alongside the psychology of supetheroism, Watchmen effectively explores the antinomies of dystopia and eutopi yet, its dystopian darkness gets so dark that it eventually moves from dystopia to anti- ‘utopia, wherein utopia and utopianism in general are more destructive to people's ives than nuclear Armageddon or alien invasion. Dystopia hasalso proven popular in film. In addition to adaptations of Fahrenheit 451 416pysTOPLA, (Truffaur 1966), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Anderson 1956, Radford 1984), The Handmaid's Tale (Schlndorff 1990), V for Vendetta (McTeigue 2005), and Watchmen (Snyder 2009), other notable films include Metropolis (Lang 1927), Logan's Run (Anderson 1976), Blade Runner (Scott 1982), Brazil (Gilliam 1985), RoboCop (Verhoeven 1987), Akiva (Oromo 1988), Gattaca (Niccol 1997), The Matrix (Wachowski brothers 1999), Equilibrium (Wimmer 2002), fon Flux (Kusama 2005), and Children of Men (Cuat6n 2006). Dystopian worlds can also be seen in such television series as The Prisoner (1967-8), Blakes 7 (1978-81), Max Headroom (1987), and Dark Ange! (2000-2). While it is too early to predict the resilience of the dystopia in the twenty-first century or whether a new dystopian form awaits over the horizon, there ean be little doubt that the dystopia thrived in the twentieth century and continues to show its health in the new millennium. It continues to embody utopianism by kicking the darkness until it bleeds daylight and to critique timely political issues while also locating hope in pethaps unexpected places: sites of resistance both within the narrative and, pethaps more importantly, within those readers who heed its warnings. Bibliography Chie, J (1993) “Orwell, George” in J. Clte and P. Nicholls (ede) The Encylopedia of Science Ficton, London: Orbit Forster, E. (1988) "The Machine Stops.” in PS. Wartick, C.G, Waugh, and MH. Greenberg (eds) Science icon: the Science Fiction Resesrch Avastin anthology, New York: Harper & Rov Gotlieb, E. (2001) Dystpian Fiction East and West unvere of terror and tri, Montreal and Kingston: ‘McGill. Queen’ Univesity Press Huey, A. (1998) Brave New Word, Landen: Flamingo Moore, A and Gibbons, D. (1987) Watcmen, New York: DC Comic. Moylan (2000) Sera of the Untased Sky: scene fewon, utopia, dystopia, Boulder, CO: Westview Orwell, G. (1990) Nineteen Eighty-Four, New York: Penguin, Sargent, LT. (1994) "The Thee Faces of Utopianism Revisited” Utopian Stuer, 5(L) 1-37, Stablfoed, B. (1993) *Dystopias” in J. Clute and P. Nichols (eds) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Orbit. ‘Zarapasin,¥. (1972) We, tans. Mira Ginsburg, New York: EOS, 477