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.
Some of the best dystopias I have ever seen or read are usually formed from society adapting to a devastating situation in a realistic and relatable way. In Children of Men1, no children have been born in twenty years. Society’s focus has shifted. Everything is flat and meaningless, with humanity slowly dying off, which leads people towards a hedonistic lifestyle, or filling maternal voids with pets and animals. These are all understandable if not relatable responses to that situation.
Another excellent, similar example comes from the Love, Death, and Robots2 episode Pop Squad, where humanity have developed a drug that induces immortality. Faced with overpopulation, breeding is forbidden, and police enforce this ban… by executing children. It is shocking and horrific but at its core, on some level, it is understandable3. The short story follows one of these police officers as he comes to terms with what he is removing from the world. For a story as short as it is, it packs an astonishing punch.
My point really is that a dystopia formed from some idea of how society might break down is infinitely less compelling to me compared to a dystopia that has grown and evolved from a series of unavoidable events. I had been looking at the world building from the wrong angle. If you put all the pieces of your dystopia together then try to justify why the world has ended up the way it has, then it might fall flat and come across as too convenient. But if you take a simple premise and figure out how people would react to it at that moment, and then in a year, then in five years, then in ten? You’ll find the small decisions, the little shifts in society, until the dystopia falls out of the other side.