Why Is Dystopian Literature Experiencing Such a Rise in Popularity Today? | Teen Ink

Why Is Dystopian Literature Experiencing Such a Rise in Popularity Today?

January 22, 2019
By Anonymous

What if we live in a world where you have to be perfect or equal to each other or live in a world where technology does everything for you? These type of worlds are in dystopian stories. Dystopian is literature genre of fictional writing used to explore social and political structures in 'a dark, nightmare world.' The term dystopia is defined as a society characterized by poverty, squalor or oppression and the theme is most commonly used in science fiction and speculative fiction genres. My statement is that dystopian worlds aren’t what you always expect the world to be like.

To explain in the story Harrison Bergeron it shows that they live in a perfect society where there is equality. In the story it has amendments that there society has to follow to make there world perfect in this quote it shows what they have to follow. “All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” These amendments are the law in the story and they have to follow them so everyone is equal to each other. In this story everyone is handicap they had to wear things like, bags/weight and mental radios. In this quote it tells what the handicaps do. “They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like the cat drug in.” These handicaps make everyone see that everyone is not prettier or smarter or anything and they are equal to each other.

The next story is the Veldt and it shows futuristic settings and how things can take control over humans. My first quote from this story about the nursery and how it takes control, “As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa….Remarkable how the nursery read the thoughts in the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun-sun. Giraffes-giraffes. Death and death.” This shows that the nursery took over their children's life where they didn’t want to leave the nursery and spend time with their family but also made them think that they are different things than human. Throughout the story you realize that the house does everything for the humans in quote it explains how the house acts, “That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and the nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and clean the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic body wash can? I cannot. And it’s isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.” The house takes over them like the quote was saying that the house is basically a mom because it does everything for the humans that live there it cooks for them and the nursery takes care of the children for them.

The final story is Ten with a Flag which this story is where the government is involved in the people's life in this story. This story lets the human escape reality because they have driverless cars for example “Once we’d turned onto the surface streets,Johnnie engaged the auto-drive and leaned back in his seat. I thought you said you wanted to drive. I lied I just wanted to talk to you without a speaker.” The cars take over when they don’t want to drive or they want to talk instead of driving. That quote shows escaping reality because in the real world our cars can’t just take over and drive for us. The final quote talks about central predictions that the government tells the parents the future of their child. “You can predict future activity through sheer computational power. Central has an over ninety-nine percent success rate with this test. We don’t question the results.” The government basically tells you what your child's rate and there future for you children is.

To sum up dystopian worlds aren’t perfect as they seem to be. In story Harrison Bergeron they try to make everyone seem perfect and at the end of it not everyone was perfect. Then in the story the Veldt it talks about the futuristic setting where technology takes over in the humans life. The final story was Ten with a Flag which the government was involved with everyone and the government tells the humans/parents what their child future is and what is it rank. Therefore all of these dystopian stories weren’t as perfect as they seem to be at the end.



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