Contemplating Dystopian Fiction in 2020

Sometimes this year has felt like the opening scenes to a disaster film.

I’m far from the first person to make this observation, or to joke about the 2020 showrunners being overzealous in their writing.

I mean, those murder hornets in the first act showing up briefly in the headlines again right before the big election? Or the deciding Senate races in that election being pushed off to the opening salvo of Season 2021, rather than ending in 2020?

This makes for a weird time to be writing stories about people confronting disasters, which seem to be the only thing I’m ever interested in exploring. Disease, conflagration, descent into war…all of these things feel too real nowadays.

Still, there is something worth exploring in how humans react to terrible things. We all encounter disaster in our lives — often many times. It’s more unusual to go through mass disaster along with everyone else, but far from unheard of, and all signs point to us experiencing this again and again. We have to learn to cope.

Literature is full of stories that take place against the backdrop of war, and entertainment is replete with post-apocalyptic wastelands. Recent YA trends are full of plucky young heroines defeating a controlling dystopian regime and restoring freedom and normalcy, to the point that it’s a dominant trope in the genre.

I’m not going to pretend that my stories are wholly original; they fit comfortably within this vein. Everything is influenced by everything else.

But what stands out to me about people is our resilience and the complexity of our lives. A good war story is about people, not just war. A pandemic story is about people, not just the disease. Don’t get me wrong, I love some good military strategy and epidemiology, but we’re a selfish species — we want to read about ourselves.

And so I write about daily lives, people living and surviving. It’s the topic of constant conversation these days, as we soothe each other and terrify each other with the things we have experienced. Fiction is not good for working over the same traumas we face in our own lives — we all want a bit of escapism — but it is very good for stepping slightly away from the real world and exploring that almost-familiar place.

I’ve encountered so many dystopias that are horrendous places where no one could ever want to live, but the normalcy of life under authoritarianism is far more interesting to me. How does a society degrade to that place? How difficult or easy is it to see as it happens?

In fiction, we’re used to people being forced into terrible situations, but if we look at the lives of those among us who live in the roughest conditions, it is often, on some level, a choice. Refugees had to decide when it was time to flee. Queer teenagers on the street had to choose between suppressing themselves enough to stay with their parents or risking dangerous levels of rejection.

It’s not much of a choice, but it’s still a choice on a tragic level.

What conditions would lead someone to sign themselves over to a dystopian regime? When is that the best choice among many terrible ones?

There’s much more that I want to explore in disaster literature than just these elements of experience and agency, but I think they’re important. Defeating the evil empire is not the only arc that matters, and is in fact one of the least interesting. There’s so much more to life, so many more internal triumphs, than a fight on an epic scale.

Most of us don’t get to lead our people to freedom, but we all get to create a life among the disasters that surround us.