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A future so chaotic and grim, you won't want to live long enough to get there.
— Tagline for the Trauma 2020 novels by Peter Beere.
A Dystopia, also called a Negative Utopia, is an imaginary society that comments on our own society and that a majority of us would fear to live in. The trick to creating a Dystopia is to take a social issue and turn it Up To Eleven. Better yet, do it with several issues, or perhaps all of them if time permits.
A dystopian setting is a world that has one or more problems exaggerated to the extreme. As mentioned before, it is a social commentary literally in the background, as is a utopian setting. The two share a problem in sometimes being a little too one-note. The author is thinking "capitalism sucks!", for instance, and everything wrong with the world turns out be clearly the fault of nasty plutocrats and their nasty, greedy corporations. Conversely, it could be "governments suck!" and the corporations are the last line of defense against the evil bureaucrats, or worse, the world could be under the control of a 1984-style totalitarian state. The author could believe that Love Hurts, and thus there is No Sex Allowed and feeling Emotions is a punishable offense. Whichever, it is just one note.
The better dystopias seem to be about how a multitude of things have gone wrong, and now here we are, surviving with as much grace as possible.
Some dystopias have its citizens living out dehumanized and often fearful lives, feeling the government's eyes upon them at every waking moment and afraid to step out of line for even a moment lest they be brutalized by the police or worse, taken away by the Secret Police. Other dystopias have the people as happy as any utopian world, but through Government Drug Enforcement or Happiness In Slavery. Some dystopias are Empires With A Dark Secret, with those who find out about said secret often being Released To Elsewhere. And some Dystopias are such only for the law-breakers. One man's Utopia can easily be another man's Dystopia, and so on.
Occasionally, a Fish Out Of Water will seem to arrive in a Utopia, only to find that it's really a dystopia for all but the elite.
Expect curfews to show up early in; they're a sure-fire cue card for oppression.
Often, and especially in literary examples, a dystopia is a Deconstruction of an earlier creator's Utopia.
Compare with Author Tract, After The End Crapsack World, and World Half Empty. Contrast with Utopia and Mary Suetopia, the latter often an unintentional Dystopia created by the author. See You Fail Economics Forever for one reason why certain Dystopias could not exist in reality.
For more types of Dystopias, see You Would Not Want To Live In Dex.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Gunnm (aka Battle Angel Alita) — highlights to Scrapyard. In some ways, Tiphares is even worse. In fact, it pretty much moves up to Crapsack World . Last Order applies this to the universe. And it's ALL Alita's fault!
- Runessa's homeworld in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, as revealed in StrikerS Sound Stage X. Living in a land of nationalism, racism, and pointless wars, there was a severe lack of food and daily necessities, but there were plenty of weapons to go around. Runessa mentioned that, for as long as she remembered, she had always slept with guns on her side, and she had always thought that she was going to live there for the rest of her life until she was shot and an NGO rescued her. So war-torn was her land, that even during the Jail Scaglietti incident, she considered Mid-childa to be an unbelievably peaceful place.
- At the height of Light's power in Death Note, we see that the world's become a dark shadow of its earlier self. Crime's way down, but the fact that all it takes for someone to die is a name, a face and a criminal record (possibly even if it's fake), everyone lives in terror.
- Texhnolyze, full stop.
- The Blame universe certainly qualifies.
Comic Books
- Lots of comic book miniseries, many of them set in alternate versions of past history where the presence of superheroes have altered society as we know it, such as The Golden Age, The American Way, and especially Watchmen.
- Subverted in Transmetropolitan. The future setting appears at first to be a filthy, crowded, cruel dystopia. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that they're dealing with essentially the same issues we deal with today, just with the volume turned up by technology and increased population. The subversion is further driven home by the protagonist's ultimately optimistic nature. There's even a Christmas special where he explicitly states that things tend to be better in the future.
- Mega City One, home of Judge Dredd. Actually, all of the mega cities in Judge Dredd's world qualify. And nearly all of the habitable land outside them is a wasteland, peppered with radioactive areas and populated by mutants - the result of a series of nuclear wars. So the whole of Judge Dredd's world qualifies.
Film
- George Lucas' 1971 film THX 1138 takes place in an antiseptic future that seems to have combined the most self-destructive tendencies of both socialism and capitalism. Religion is illegal except for worship of the Almighty State, and the residents all work for the government, in one capacity or another, and are expected to inform on their neighbors for crimes such as computer hacking or refusing to take their medication; at the same time, though, they are encouraged to work long hours, make money, and buy as much material property as they can. (We see THX himself buying a red thing at a store that sells nothing but different-colored things; he takes it home and promptly throws it down the garbage disposal, which is what you're apparently supposed to do with them.)
- Soylent Green.
- Parodied in the world as run by bowler hats in Meet The Robinsons.
- Remarkably, in Woody Allen's film Sleeper, he uses the setting of a future dystopia to pay homage to the style of old silent comedies.
- Brazil by Terry Gilliam.
- Equilibrium features a future where human emotion has been outlawed in an effort to stop another disastrous war from coming to pass. Emotion is kept in check by a drug called Prozium, anything inducive of emotion is destroyed (books, movies, music, art and even cute little dogs), and "sense offenders" who refuse to take the drug are terminated with extreme prejudice by the Sweepers and the Grammaton Clerics.
- Let's not forget The Matrix; dystopia brought about by
Technology Sucks Humans Are Bastards, leading to the Robot War.
- The world of Repo! The Genetic Opera is ruled by a corporation that has had murder sanctioned by law, who rose to power on a pile of harvested organs. It is exactly as icky as it sounds.
- Idiocracy was presented as a dystopia based on the extreme dumbing down of America. However, it also included extreme cases of mass consumerism and product placement (brought to you by Carl's Jr.). And apparently Mike Judge had an axe to grind about celebrities being elected into office (Wrestler, turned porn star, turned president).
Literature
- The classic literary examples:
- Also Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick and its film adaptation, Blade Runner.
- Cyberpunk usually takes place in a Dystopia, or a society that's heading towards one.
- Efrafa. Both a classic ruled-by-dictator-with-a-fist-of-iron dystopia and also a rabbit warren!
- Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, with an America where all books are banned. In the end, there is a bit of twisted hope, as all the cities get blown apart, leaving the chance for those who have kept the literary tradition to rebuild.
- Lois Lowry's The Giver, a rare dystopian novel for kids, with a society that has gotten rid of pain and conflict through "The Sameness".
- Key/Visual Arts did a kinetic novel in this vein, called planetarian.
- In Myst: The Book of D'Ni, the survivors of the fallen Utopia D'Ni discover Terahnee, which appears to be everything D'Ni was and more, but it is not what it appears. While D'Ni's Utopia was built on semi-magical technology, Terahnee is built on slavery. In fact, slavery of the same people the D'Ni survivors intermarried with. Time to run!
- Danish author Dennis Jürgensen wrote a book titled Dystopia, which hits all the main points, and offers an interesting solution... two youths from a dystopia where the 'social issues' are xenophobia, intolerance and mistrust, are thrown into a Fish Out Of Water situation in another world, literally named 'Dystopia', where the issue is apathy and defeatism. Can two different, and equally flawed, attitudes cancel each others out? Maybe so. Good luck finding a translation of that book, tho...
- This Perfect Day by Ira Levin depicts a communist technocratic dystopia controlled by a computer. In fact at the end it is revealed that the computer is controlled by a programmer elite.
- Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Everything is rationed by the theocratic government - including women.
- More precisely, the fertile women; the environment's a mess.
- The People's Republic of Haven from the Honor Harrington series practically defines this trope.
- The world of Jennifer Government is an ultra-capitalist Dystopia, where everything is for sale if you have enough money. Also, at one point, the antagonist John Nike reads an old Sci-fi novel The Merchants in Space, and dismisses the classic notion of a big government dystopia, and is disappointed when the book turns out to be a satire of capitalism.
- Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, a novella focusing on the problem of government forcing equality by any means possible. The beautiful must wear hideous masks, the strong and agile carry sacks of iron on their backs... So it goes.
- In the world Uglies is set in, anyone over sixteen is given an operation that leaves their faces and bodies flawless... and their minds empty.
Live Action TV
- Blake's 7. A Space Opera in which Earth is run by fascists, where the (few) good guys are criminals.
- Max Headroom.
- The Alternate Universe in the Red Dwarf episode "Back to Reality".
- The Alliance in the television show Firefly, whose Core world citizens enjoy a high quality of life, provided they acquiesce to the near totalitarian rulership of the Parliament; meanwhile, Rim worlds barely subsist on poorly-terraformed worlds. Most notably illuminated in the movie Serenity, in which viewers learn that the Alliance, by introducing a drug into a moderately-civilized planet's environment to make the population more docile, accidentally killed 99.9% of the populace and created the Reavers. In keeping with the show's central conceit as a Space Western, the Alliance seems to be based on an exaggerated concept of how post-American Civil War Confederates might have seen the victorious Union.
- The Alphaverse in Charlie Jade, a corrupt megacorp-dominated plutocracy where chip implants are mandatory, people are divided into castes, justice is an illusion, and pollution and depletion of natural resources are so ridiculously high that the dominant megacorp plans to use its trans-universe link to steal water from a utopian parallel Earth.
- The Mirror Universe in Star Trek is a dystopia and its own trope. Various different takes on Trek's particular mirror universe fiddle with the extent of its dystopian nature. One novel posited that it was a relatively recent thing, caused by the Enterprise-E crew not wiping Zefram Cochrane's memories before they left the past, thus causing humanity to venture into space paranoid about the threat of the Borg. Another posited that the society had simply always been more cruel and ruthless, as proved by things such as Achilles refusing to return the body of the king's son (one of his few acts of mercy) in The Iliad. Deep Space Nine seemed to have a take on it closer to just making everyone in the mirror universe a Jerkass.
- Several alternate universes and/or timelines seen in Stargate SG-1 featuring the breakdown of society, the defeat/near defeat of Earth by its enemies, etc.
- Many an alternate unvierse in Sliders. Notable example was that one world where The Summer of Love is still going on.
Tabletop Games
- The Warhammer 40000 universe is one gigantic Dystopia/Cosmic Horror world, born from the sheer, horrific build-up of intolerance, hatred, repression, religious fanaticism, cruelty, hedonism, decadence, greed, and just about every other vice you could possibly imagine, over the span of millennia. Quite possibly the worst component, however, is simply neglect. The fact that many of said vices have physical form, are sentient, and actively working towards the eventual destruction of everything probably doesn't help. Nothing is ever going to get better there.
- Not to mention there's a faction of Well Intentioned Extremists who are considered to be naive because of that belief. Given the setting, there's probably a kernel of truth to that.
- Paranoia is a dystopia, albeit a parodic one.
- Alpha Complex is not a dystopia because Friend Computer says it is not. Only Commie mutant traitors disagree with The Computer. Do you disagree with Friend Computer, Citizen? No? That's good! Be happy, citizen. Happiness is mandatory.
- The 2056 juncture of the Tabletop Game Feng Shui is equal parts Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four. The Buro government monitors its citizens constantly, same-race relationships are frowned upon at best as "racist" and punished at worst, guns and kung fu are outlawed, it's a crime to be unhappy, all TV (except for advertising) is pay-per-view, you can't get ahead unless you work for the Buro, and the only thing worse than falling into the Public Order (2056's brutal police) machine is letting the Bureau of Happiness and Productivity get hold of you — Mind Rape is the absolute kindest term for what these guys do to people. And that's not even mentioning the CDCA (the group responsible for arcanowave technology and the Abominations) and the creepifying horrors that they get up to.
- Shadowrun. One of the most famous cyberpunk RPGs set in a Dystopia, one that is played to the hilt just as described at the top of the page. Corporations are huge, often quite literally evil, and all of them employ multiple packs of criminals to do their dirty work. Racism has been given up, but only because people are such assholes that they'd rather focus on Fantastic Racism. Heck, there's even this one bit from the fourth edition core book, talking about the availability of medical treatment, which cites privatized health care as one of the causes of dystopia (oddly enough, using the criticisms usually leveled at socialized/universal healthcare):
"Thanks to privatized healthcare, most people are forced to throw themselves and their ailments on the not-so-tender mercies of an overstressed public healthcare system. Spirits help you if you’re seriously sick or hurt and have to deal with a public hospital: most of them mean well, but they’re notoriously understaffed, awash in red tape, and generally a nightmare to navigate."
Video Games
Western Animation
- Futurama combines tropes from both Dystopia and Utopia to good effect.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, the Gaang arrives in the 'Promised City' Ba Sing Se, the supposed last 'free' place from the Fire Nation after 100 years of war, only to find out that it's "just a bunch of walls and rules", which surpresses its inhabitants more effeciently than the Fire Nation ever could (to the point of brainwashing everyone who dares to mention that there's a century-long war going on in the whole world outside the walls).
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