I have broached the depiction of Dystopias in literature, on television and in the movies, in at least one case. A lot of the good dystopian stories have undergone adaptations into film: Fahrenheit 451 being a notably bad example.
The most notable Dystopias in film included Blade Runner, The Running Man and Equilibrium among others. Dystopias on TV have included the Mirror Universe in Star Trek, the nation of Bregna in the MTV Liquid Television animated series Aeon Flux, the funhouse reflection of early Eighties America of Max Headroom, supposedly set "twenty minutes into the future," but nowadays mostly set twenty-nine years, 364 days, 23 hours and 40 minutes in the past instead; and the Federation of the BBC series Blake's Seven, not counting the Nigel Kneale adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four back in the 1950s, and 1968's famous "The Year of The Sex Olympics," which predicted a jaded, TV-fixated consumer society hooked on Big Brother-style reality TV.
Not all dystopias have resembled jackbooted nightmares, all gleaming weapons and pressed black shirts and armbands and peaked caps, marching in lockstep down streets towards massive statues of the Beloved Leader. Some dystopias just look as if they're working, but they're barely holding on - failed states, echoing the real world Somalia more than the real world North Korea.
The 'Verse of Firefly is one such broken, failed state. In Joss Whedon's far future, Earth had to be evacuated. It's gone. Humans have managed to colonise a bunch of new worlds and moons, and terraformed them to make them inhabitable. However, there are problems - the Alliance, the jackbooted Authorities which unified the systems, and the Reavers, the polar opposite of the calm, measured Alliance: monstrous, self-mutilating cannibal rapists who torture their victims alive. A problem created by, and officially ignored by, the Alliance, who covered up the fact that their experiment to create drugs to make people ... better ... created a race of Frankenstein creatures whose aggressor response was pushed beyond madness.
Incidentally, the dystopias mentioned here have all been of human origin. I've left out such stories as the Tripods series and Capella's Golden Eyes, because these were not dystopias, but rather invasions. Also left out, stories with a cyberpunk theme such as William Gibson's Sprawl series Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Also only being mentioned now, the concept of the unique dystopias featuring in various tabletop paper-and-dice roleplaying games.
Some of the unique dystopian societies brought up in various roleplaying games have included:-
- The Incorporated States of America, the setting for R Talsorian's roleplaying game Cybergeneration (1993). In the year 2027, with the world coming under a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by corporations, a vehicle crashes spilling its toxic cargo into the environment. A strange new plague spreads across the globe, infecting only the children, mutating them into frightening new forms which allow them to take the fight to the adults who are increasingly distrustful of the younger generation.
- The World of Darkness, a setting originally developed by Mark Rein * Hagen in 1991 for White Wolf, a game publisher. The world superficially resembles ours, but for the presence of supernatural forces lurking in the shadows. Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, witches, demons and worse monsters each carve out their places in the world and control the lives of human herds for fun and, occasionally, sustenance. In the World of Darkness, those mortals who gaze too long into the Abyss ... become part of the Abyss themselves.
- In the Paranoia roleplaying game, the world has been devastated - all but for a Logan's Run-style City of Domes called Alpha Complex, ruled by a Computer overlord whose sanity makes HAL 9000 seem positively rational by comparison. A game played for the darkest humour, your characters are clones (maximum of 6) called Troubleshooters. Each Troubleshooter has a grim secret, belongs to a secret society, and has a mutation. Secret society memberships and mutations are punishable by disintegration. Your characters' goal is to see which of your clones gets to die in such a way that nothing remains of him but a pair of smoking boots.
- and in the Traveller roleplaying game, set in a utopia in the far future, the Third Imperium, the utopia has to be offset by a contrasting Dystopian state acting as the setting's default threat nation. In this case, the bad guys are the Zhodani Consulate, basically 1960s Star Trek Klingons who "look like Puerto Ricans and dress in gold lame," with an incomprehensible language ... and, in the case of the Zhodani, an upper and middle class gifted with powerful psionic abilities, notably telepathy and clairvoyance, by which means their Stasi-like secret police, the Tvarchedle', keep tabs on the entire population through remote viewing.
All of which brings us to the final question of this series.
Practically every medium, every genre, every television and movie franchise and game, has some sort of bad guy nation, or has been set in a bad guy nation.
Only ... why? Why do so many of these settings turn out so bad?
You may formulate your own theories, but what stands out to me is that dystopias are, in some cases, necessary to highlight the better nature of the protagonists.
Sometimes, the protagonist - a formerly willing participant in the atrocity of the culture - learns to come to his senses and becomes a rebel against the culture. Often, the protagonist is one of the oppressed victims, forced to run and hide from a universe that seems to hate his very existence, and would seek to end it as painfully as possible, showcasing the nobility of the oppressed cause he represents - a democrat in a totalitarian world; a Jewish refugee in an alternate future where Hitler won WWII.
A man who wants to live to see 31 in Logan's Run's City of Domes, rather than face atomisation in Carousel or death from a Sandman's gun.
Some dystopias are bad, because they give the characters something to fight against - the fight of the Cyberevolved resembling the battles of the mutants in The X-Men, striving to seek their place in a world of norms which rejects them.
And sometimes, the settings themselves are the star of the show, because for some strange reason, no matter how wicked the apparent setting, something about the place just draws the fans to it, fantasising about what it would be like to live there - witness the fans of the 'Verse running scenarios set in the roleplaying game adaptation of Firefly, and people actually creating Zhodani characters to play the role of mind-reading secret police officers in the Consulate.
I think that we like our dystopias, in the end, for the simple reason that we can look at the casual brutality of Battle Royale's Battle Experiment 68 Program, the Firemen of Fahrenheit 451, the Zhodani Tvarchedle' of Traveller, the Sandmen and Carousel in Logan's Run, the Klingons and Romulans of the original Star Trek, the Judges of Mega-City One in Judge Dredd, the Outer and Inner Party and Big Brother of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, and all these other horrifying little worlds, and we can put down the book, or turn off the TV, or pack up our dice, after such a cathartic exploration into the dark side of humanity, and wander off into the daylight, with the one cheering thought in our minds.
It could be worse.
It could be real.
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