Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

Rant: An Oral Biography, by Chuck Pahlaniuk
I don’t know about you, but a future where time travel is possible and I can sleep all day actually sounds like a better option, even if it is bizarrely delineated and suffering from an outbreak of rabies, and the time travel method involves head-on car collisions. Not probable in our timeline, of course, but still.

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
To view Dhalgren as a scenario we are possibly living in, we would have to understand what is going on in Dhalgren. Since that’s relatively impossible (by design), and since there have been no reports of people turning into trees, and no one knows where the “autumnal city” is, let alone how to wound it (I’m thinking maybe Colorado Springs, which is relatively lovely in fall?), we feel relatively safe saying we’re not living in a post-apocalyptic fantasy wasteland where a mysterious wanderer with a cage of blades around their hand is doing confusing things that eventually circle back on themselves. Which might be a good thing. YMMV.

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
As thinking about Ursula K. LeGuin’s fascinating but unnerving tale of a man in an Orwellian dystopia whose dreams become reality under his therapist’s manipulations causes all kinds of existential crises for the rest of us if it’s true, perhaps it’s best to just say this one won’t happen, and go about our lives assuming we’re all real and our existences have not been altered by the dreams of a therapy patient. We already experience enough existential dread without bringing that possibility into play.

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
We are sadly far from a future of modular personality, knowledge chips slotted into the cranium, highly advanced gender reassignment surgeries that usher in a new era of gender and sexual fluidity as the norm, and hyperrealistic VR. However, we also happily don’t exist in a world of casual murder, widespread organized criminal corruption, open human trafficking, and death by brain burnout, so on balance, it’s kind of a win that we don’t inhabit the twisted streets of Effinger’s wretched hive of scum, villainy, and questionable black market cyberware.

The Close Calls
These are a lot of books whose predictions hew closer to the way we’re currently living, but aren’t exact. For instance, while we’re rediscovering mysticism and Nazis are openly marching across America, Philip K. Dick’s The Mn in the High Castle is still, for the most part, pretty off the mark. But if close is a distinction that only counts in nuclear warheads and dystopian fiction, we should examine just how close some books have come to predicting our uncertain present.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
For many years the front-runner in dystopian literature with ties to the present, Aldous Huxley’s novel of a cheerful totalitarian society where everyone who can’t amuse themselves to death is exiled to “savage reservations” to live in the state of nature does have a ring of truth. Similarly, the idea that not killing someone is all it takes to avoid cruelty, large swaths of all-encompassing mass media, and the intense focus on tribalism and programming within social groups all track pretty well with modern life. However, the mistake Brave New World makes is that none of us are currently living in a happy dystopian bubble of mass media, drugs, and casual sex, and instead must face head-on the threat of resurgent fascism and the fear of a xenophobic surveillance state.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Since it was first published, there’s been a laser-like focus on Ray Bradbury’s novel—specifically the part where “firemen” go from house to house collecting illicit literature, which they then burn. What makes this a close call is Bradbury’s focus on the idea technology and media might lull people into ignoring what their government is doing, his prediction that we would own wall-sized HDTV screens and feel some spurious kinship with the people in them, and the constant threat we might once again break out into a destructive war between those that accept a comfortable cage and those that long for an uncomfortable, but more realistic truth. All of this more or less dovetails with elements of modern internet and media culture in a pretty unsettling manner, though without Bradbury’s lyricism.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence, by Jack Womack
Until recently, this was my front-runner for exactly the kind of dystopia we were living in. Womack’s novel follows Lola Hart, a plucky teenager whose family goes through a slow and horrifying death spiral as the country around them does the same. While Womack’s America is a nightmarish hellscape all its own, with Christian cults on the rise, teenagers getting shipped off to reprogramming camps because their parents don’t want to deal with them, martial law, and the executive branch being torn limb from limb by an angry mob on the White House lawn after Marine One gets hit with a rocket launcher, the real horror comes from the fact that most of the disturbing events of the novel— from the crime, to the destructive police raids on lower-income and black families, to the protests that turn violent— are more or less already happening to people around you, and that what happens to Lola and her family could possibly happen to anyone if things go just slightly wrong enough.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
The basis for the word “Orwellian,this novel’s paranoid imaginings conjure up an England recast as an Eastern European police state in which giving in to the government is more or less inevitable, everyone is watched closely, and citizens frequently betray each other. There is a ring of truth to the blind nationalism as well as the presence of a surveillance state, though the fact Orwell uses the specific trappings of European communist dictatorships does take the edge off a little. Still, elements like the “two-minute hate,” where the citizens are encouraged to scream abuse for two minutes at a strawman representing an opposing viewpoint (hello Twitter!) the constant revising of history, “enhanced interrogation” that crosses the line into psychological torture have all made it into modern systems or government in some form or another, whether we like it or not, making this close enough to hurt.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
There are a lot of similarities between the modern world and Atwood’s terrifying dystopian fiction. For one, oppressive kyriarchal regimes serving to keep women restrained in whatever creepy form in which dudes wish them to exist are still in place, and with new laws and executive actions being passed regularly to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, we’re getting ever closer to a future where they are pushed into the ultimate form of oppression. Thankfully, as long as we’re not as emotionally battered and dead as everyone in Atwood’s novel, and as long as fundamentalism of all stripes remains a national punchline, we can keep this one from happening for a few decades at least.

Change Agent, by Daniel Suarez
Suarez’s books always have a finger on the pulse of current technology, but he pushes them far enough into speculation that we’re not there just yet. But we’re close. In this one, they manage to edit a heart defect using the CRISPR technology, and if that’s possible if we keep at it, it could lead to in vitro, and even in vivo edits of genes. We’re even working on cloning technology that will give us things like the bio-knife, and we’ve already got child beauty pageants, widespread poverty, and hashtagged police chases. We’re also getting close to thin portable computers and printable drugs. But all these things have yet to combine into a slick and darkly comic technothriller future, so we’re leaving this one a question mark for now.

Thinner Than Thou, by Kit Reed
Reed is another whose terrifying future, in which body consciousness have become a full-blown religion, might not have arrived just yet, but remains close enough. We’re a society obsessed with image—one need only consider, well, [gestures broadly at all of Western media] to see the twisted nubs of Reed’s unsettling dystopia, which punishes everyone for problems of physical desire they can’t control. It’s not the end, but it’s close enough to see from here.

The (Dubious) Winner
While art doesn’t imitate life exactly, for the purposes of our thought experiment, one participant stands above the others like a glacier poking out from a rapidly rising sea…

Clade, by James Bradley
A week ago I would have said this was nonsense. While Bradley’s haunting, strangely optimistic novel of apocalyptic climate and civilization collapse is based somewhat on actual science and predictions, it’s also much further along in the future than we are, and presents a much prettier than our own, what with the genetically engineered bioluminescent creatures, polar-flipped Aurora Borealis, and melancholic scenes of the Australian bush. But then Texas got hit with Hurricane Harvey, Irma and José started blowing up the coast, and articles came out stating we might be witnessing a larger ecological disaster than we initially thought, and suddenly between the wild swings of weather, the near-xenophobic governmental policies towards immigration, and the devastating hurricanes and floods, here we are. Congratulations, Clade. Hopefully our future is as pretty and optimistic as yours, even as we’re running for our lives from natural disasters every bit as devastating.
What’s your dystopia of choice?