Dystopia A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, or anti-utopia) is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is literally translated as not-good place, an antonym of eutopia. Such societies appear in many artistic works, particularly in stories set in a future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, and/or technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead to such a dystopia-like condition. Famous depictions of dystopian societies include R.U.R. (which introduced the concept of robots and the word robot for the first time); Nineteen Eighty-Four, which takes place in a totalitarian invasive super state; Brave New World, where the human population is placed under a caste of psychological allocation; Fahrenheit 451, where the state burns books to create apathy and disinterest by the general public; A Clockwork Orange, where the state uses questionable methods to reform violent youths; Blade Runner in which engineered replicants infiltrate society and must be hunted down before they injure humans; The Matrix, which depicts a future earth wherein war between humans and AI Machines has led the sentient machines to trap the entire human race in a Computer-Programmed simulated virtual reality called The Matrix; The Hunger Games, in which the government controls its people by maintaining a constant state of fear through forcing randomly selected children to participate in an annual fight to the death; Logans Run, in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age; Soylent Green, where society suffers from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, a hot climate, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including soylent green. Jack Londons novel The Iron Heel was described by Erich Fromm as the earliest of the modern Dystopia. Etymology Dystopia represents a counterpart of utopia, a term originally coined by Thomas More in his book of that title completed in 1516. Utopia is derived from the Greek words ou (οὐ), not, and topos (τόπος), place. Dystopia retains the topos, but combines it instead with Ancient Greek: δυσ-, bad, hard.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 22:41:24 +0000