Themes

I have been thinking a lot about dystopias recently, prompted by a precarious visit to my old smuggling work-in-progress. My aim was to flesh out the world building and establish precisely the kind of dystopia the unfortunate main character lived within. Perhaps inevitably, as I waded into what I hoped to be a sea of multidimensional compelling dystopia, I found a shallow imitation of it. The obvious questions is: what makes a compelling dystopia? Is it a political satire, with the big bad government oppressing the people? Is it a social separation of different kinds of people based on class, or thoughts, or where they live? Maybe it is all of those things. ...