1. The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood (1985) Atwood disputes the theory that her 1985 novel is set in a purely feminist dystopia...
1. The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood (1985)
Atwood disputes the theory that her 1985 novel is set in a purely feminist dystopia: class comes before gender as a ranking factor in Gilead, a military dictatorship built on the remains of the US. Still, it’s close, with women divided into eight strata – “wives” at the top, “unwomen” at the bottom. Somewhere between lies the handmaid, one of the fertile minority required to surrender control of their wombs to the privileged and barren. Nearly 30 years on, Atwood’s projection of the most extreme victory imaginable for the anti-choice lobby retains its political tang.
2. The Trial
Franz Kafka (1925)
“Kafkaesque” has become such a ubiquitous blanket description for multiple varieties of murky, irrational administration that it no longer adequately implies the specifically nervous qualities of Kafka’s own work. Though it was published in an unfinished state in 1925, it’s hard to discern which ellipses and inconsistencies may be by design in this nightmare narrative of a banker tried by an unknown authority for an unknown crime. Perhaps it’s the government persecuting Josef K that hasn’t completed its thought process. Though Kafka’s legal background figures heavily in this bureaucratic satire, man’s own irrational morality is also on trial here.
3. The Giver
Lois Lowry (1993)
You can’t move for grim prophecies and romantic anti-authoritarianism in young adult fiction these days. The Hunger Games and Divergent, among many others, have latched on to the blend of profound scepticism and socially conscious idealism that bristles in 21st-century teens. All of which makes Lowry’s remarkable children’s novel – about a young boy elected to store all human memories preceding his society’s faux-utopia of Sameness – seem even more forward-thinking than it did on its publication in 1993, when it was challenged by numerous American parents’ councils and school library boards. More philosophically probing than its contemporary competition, and better-written too.
4. Watership Down
Richard Adams (1972)
The serene Berkshire meadows of Sandleford don’t seem particularly dystopian, either as described in Adams’s densely imagined, spiritually rich novel or Martin Rosen’s exquisitely rendered film adaptation. Underground, however, it’s a different story: the lapine police state Efrafa, led by demon bunny General Woundwort, was the stuff of childhood nightmares (and probably a few adult ones too) for any number of post-1970s babies. As in Atwood’s novel, it’s the challenge of reproduction that drives the conflict of class and caste, though the rabbits’ survival is more immediately threatened above ground too, as man-driven tractors disrupt the idyll.
5. La Jetée
Chris Marker (1962)
Marker’s visionary film constructs as vivid and philosophically searching a future as has ever been projected – and does so in the space of 28 minutes, and mostly out of still photographs. In post-third world war Paris, a prisoner is selected as a guinea pig in a time-travel experiment intended to repair the all-but-destroyed present; shifting between past and future, he finds both the key to regenerating his own society and a personal existential truth that renders the former discovery moot. This poetic brainteaser also provided the source for Terry Gilliam’s best film, 12 Monkeys.
6. Gattaca
Andrew Niccol (1997)
New Zealand film-maker Niccol’s debut deserves special mention for the chicness of its hopeless vision: its sleekly cut costumes and shimmering, Oscar-nominated production design make a refreshing change from the dusty aesthetic wastelands and indeterminate knitwear of so many anti-utopian projections. That’s marginal compensation for a bleakly class-structured future dictated heavily by eugenics. Cannily written as concerns about cloning and genetic manipulation were hitting the headlines in the late 1990s, the film’s ethically multifaceted cautionary tale still hits a tender spot and continues to be a handy reference point for popular scientists.
7. Ur Varselklotet
Simon Stålenhag (2014)
Dystopic visions in modern art are dominated by the kind of gaudy sci-fi landscapes suited mostly to prog-rock album covers. Those are present in Swedish painter Stålenhag’s work, but in rusted, placated form, forced to co-exist with everyday suburbia. The digitally augmented paintings centre on what he calls the Riksenergi universe, a middle-class slab of 1980s Scandinavia where tracksuit-clad locals go about their daily business, paying minimal mind to the decayed robots and spacecrafts circulating passively in their midst – the hangover of an abandoned government science programme. Dinosaurs show up too in this quiet war of multiple worlds.
8. Diamond Dogs
David Bowie (1974)
No list on this subject would be complete without a mention of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s daddy (or Big Brother) of the genre, though I’ll tip my hat to it via Bowie’s dazzling sonic tribute. Bowie initially intended the project as a soundtrack to a theatrical adaptation of Orwell’s novel. When the author’s estate denied the rights, Bowie took on the persona of Halloween Jack, debauched denizen of Hunger City – Manhattan after the “glitter apocalypse”. Songs such as 1984 and Big Brother pay lip service to Orwell; the most popular of the lot, Rebel Rebel, hasn’t much to do with anything.
9. The ArchAndroid
Janelle Monáe (2010)
Monáe’s sprawling R&B concept album is a 2010 recording that looks ahead to 3005 while keeping its feet planted in 1970s funk and 1990s Afrofuturism. Monáe plays messianic robot Cindi Mayweather, sent from the future to rescue the citizens of Metropolis – the allusion to Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi touchstone is no accident – from the oppressive, love-denying regime of The Great Divide. You can debate the degree of philosophical grounding behind such lyrics as: “Take her back to Wondaland, she thinks she left her underpant.” A reassurance that we’ll at least be dancing well into the hellish future.
10. The Simpsons
Time and Punishment (1994)
We are given only a glimpse into the future in this 1994 Halloween episode, but there can be no dystopia more terrifying than one ruled by the yellow-headed family’s terminally wet, God-bothering neighbour, Ned Flanders. After inadvertently creating a time machine by wedging his hand in a toaster, hapless Homer Simpson finds himself in Flanders’s manically grinning diddly-iddly-dictatorship, where constant happiness is a legal requirement and any deviancy from the norm is punishable by lobotomy. Perhaps not the most consequential of penalties in Homer’s case, but alarming all the same.
Source: The Guardian
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