Post-Meeting Debriefing

The meeting took place at the usual time in the meeting room, on the first floor of Chester Library. Only five people, including myself, turned up. The rest of the regulars had made their apologies earlier, and some of them at the last minute.

Seeing as the races were on, I would not have blamed them for desiring to stay away from the town centre. Traffic is usually murder in Chester on Race Days, vehicular and pedestrian alike. Still, the traffic was not that bad today.

I have said plenty on the subject of dystopias, but perhaps the idea is not to everybody's tastes. Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm can seem somewhat stale to modern readers, seeing as they are allegories of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union of the time; and Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale got a mention, each covering their respective authors' take on procreation and society's expectations of the procreators.

V For Vendetta was described in detail, along with Battle Royale, both characterised by the fact that each had a movie adaptation and a graphic novel - though BR had a full novel.

At the end, I found myself wondering the same questions I'd asked in my previous posts. What makes a society dystopian? Why write about such nightmares? Why write about utopias if they are so boring? (I noted that William Gibson had written about one such Utopia, in his short story "The Gernsback Continuum," and it turned out to be a nightmare!)

And again, I returned to the conclusions I'd drawn previously.

Dystopias are Utopias ... but not for everybody. A Utopia is a place where those who belong need want for nothing. As they need want for nothing, the Brechtian maxim "Grub first - ethics later" allows those who prosper from this Utopia to claim that they can be noble towards those without privilege.

They can pretend, so to speak, that "Noblesse oblige" - Nobility obliges. As long as the system works in their favour, they can always appear magnanimous and generous towards the hoi polloi, while at the same time reaping the benefits of a system of control that puts them at the focus of the blind devotion of all the little people at the bottom.

A society is Dystopian if those for whom it is a Utopia are in the minority; for the majority, they have to struggle as best they can with everyday life, while accepting that some sort of horror exists beside that everyday life, parallel to it, permeating their collective psyche. The threat of Room 101 and the Two Minutes' Hate in Nineteen Eighty Four. Landru's Red Hour in the Star Trek episode "The Return of The Archons." The Nightwatch in Babylon 5. The Judges in Judge Dredd. The Finger in V For Vendetta. The monsters in the World of Darkness roleplaying game. The "Final Solutionists" in R Talsorian's Cybergeneration - the protagonists' own family, selling them out to the government.

And that horror is integral to keeping the public cowed, controlled and slaving to support the privileges of the few up at the top, with enforcement provided by the usual phalanges of anonymous riot gear-clad troops with water cannon, tear gas and riot shields.

Those who did not attend missed on the most logical conclusion we could draw at the meeting: that stories are driven by conflict; and where the conflict is all-pervading, the stories are that much more intense than in a Utopia, where perhaps the characters could never be put in sufficient jeopardy for the reader to give a monkey's what happens to him.

You have to make the setting grim, to highlight the sympathetic character. Consider Montag in Fahrenheit 451; he comes to the realisation that what he was doing was monstrous. We get to see the monstrous stuff he does, so that we can sympathise with his volte face.

Consider V, in V For Vendetta. He is a monster; but the Fascist system he is fighting against is worse. And what initially begins, for him, as a systematic eradication of everyone who could ever identify him from his genesis at the Larkhill concentration camp, turns into a crusade to bring down the corrupt regime in the story's second part.

V does some awful things throughout the story: but you cannot help but derive satisfaction at the way he despatches Archbishop Lilliman, a paedophile who'd used his Party connections to secure underage prostitutes for him. When V feeds Lilliman a communion wafer laced with cyanide, Finch, the detective assigned to hunt him down, comments that when the wafer reached Lilliman's stomach "it was still bread," either meaning that Transubstantiation was bunk - or that God Himself had no interest in giving the paedophile communion, so had refused to transubstantiate the wafer.

And the setting for Judge Dredd is grim indeed, so that the characteristic dark humour of the strip can shine through. And, even though it is very hard to sympathise with Dredd himself, what with the body count of two billion and six nuked Mega-Cities on his hands, you find yourself siding with the leather-clad old bastard because the alternative to The Law is as grim as it gets.

So this, then, was the meeting: a meeting whose usual admin bit was mercifully brief, over and done with in less time than it takes for a man to get the snip in 2011 - a quick lie down, a bit of local and a short time later, time for tea and biscuits and back out the door.

I made a note to comment on the forthcoming Ramsey Campbell lecture at the library next month. I'll publish more details on that in a later post. I also have to look up details of a horror event in Runcorn, too. I believe Graham Weaver and The Esoteric Bbiliophile Society have that information - watch this space.

I hope this has been a good event for all who attended. I am sorry that the rest of the regulars could not attend. I wish they had: I could have appreciated insights from Rodney, Bernard, John Oakes and others.

Next month, we will be discussing the works of John Wyndham. Back to school, ladies and gentlemen - when was the last time you read The Midwich Cuckoos?

(Well, two months ago, in my case ...)