The future is not only the domain of economic projections. Writers have long imagined future worlds where life is a totalitarian nightmare, or hubris has led to nuclear or environmental catastrophe. While each dystopia contains unique horrors, the stories often spring from the same well — a feeling that the way we're living now is unsustainable.
Q: The dystopian genre has persisted for more than two centuries. Can you explain its origins and progression?
The whole idea of dystopias and utopias taking place in the future comes almost automatically as soon as people realize that the future is going to be different from the past. Early utopias would be set on some island or over a mountain or in a hidden valley, never in the future. At the end of the 18th century, right at the time of the founding of the United States, as well as the scientific revolution, everybody got the idea that the future was going to be different from the present. And when they started conceiving utopian plans for, say, perfect societies of the future, they were almost always contrasted with a dystopia — a bad thing that either could happen or was happening all around us, which the utopia was supposed to solve. Eventually, the dystopia overtook the utopia, which pretty much petered out.
Q: And then starved.
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