Notice my title says the
world, not a world. For me, dystopias
work best when they are recognizably the
world we live in now, altered to become the
future that’s imaginable yet objectionable, frightening. It’s the world we don’t want to occupy.
There are always other options for our actual future and
that is another reason for loving dystopias—they call us to look at the world
we live in and to reconsider the ways we live, the values we hold, the choices
and consequences of those choices.
I love dystopias and have read many of them, so it’s not
surprising that my first novel, Isolation,
is dystopic. In case dystopias aren’t your usual read, let me offer an example
of how dystopias work. In Farenheit 451,
a favorite since my childhood, the world of ideas has become so threatening to
those in power that all books must be destroyed. The government spoon feeds the
population its rhetoric as entertainment. People are dumbed down by the parlor
walls (think big screen TV).
Written in 1953, televisions gaining in popularity, a cold
medium luring the masses to sit around and watch in silence rather than discuss
the world of ideas. After WWII, with the U.S. leaving Korea and moving into
Vietnam, from the quietude of the suburban 50s toward the uprisings of the 60s,
civil rights, women’s rights, a peace movement that wouldn’t be still. But
let’s not talk about any of that.
In ’53 the horizon was filled with ominous changes which
would be averted if every woman was the quintasential housewife watching soap
operas and eating bonbons. Every man the worker who did his job without
question, even if that job were to be a fireman, one who did not quell fires,
but started them, by torching books. Both of these roles are fulfilled
brilliantly in Farenheit 451 by Mildred and Guy Montag. She’s depressed; he
begins to question the state of things, fearing he’ll be caught in possession
of the book he irrationally saves from flames.
Dystopia, the world falling apart.
In 2009 as the swine flu threatened epidemics of Black
Plague proportions, the CDC and World Health Organization spread fear,
changing behaviors overnight, getting people to sleeve the sneeze, and use hand
sanitizers frequently. It was then I began to imagine the world of Isolation, a world in which the
government, there’s always a powerful government backdrop in dystopias, banned
citizens from touching their own faces, for human safety, of course.
From that premise, characters emerge, fighting one bacterial
infection or another. Agri-Biz plays its role in creating anti-bacterial
resistance through large livestock operations. Big Pharma keeps its hand in by
developing anti-bacterial products one after another after another, lining
their pockets while fleecing Homelanders and building anti-biotic resistance.
The stories in Isolation
are driven by an illusive safety which everyone seeks, but no one achieves. The
world falls apart—in California, West Virginia, Alaska, Michigan, Hawaii. The
world falls apart and readers watches in horror, realizing how close this
fiction is to the current world they live in.
Fast Forward—May 2014: E.
Coli causes product recalls for hummus
in Idaho and ground
beef nationwide, as well as the need to boil
water in Portland. Anti-biotic resistance is growing at a pace which
threatens a near post-antibiotic
future where bacteria will return to being a major cause of death, as was
true pre-WWII.
The thinking person, the one who pays attention, reads a
dystopia like Isolation realizing that this could
be the future. The world could fall
apart in just this way.
I love a good dystopia.
*This post first appeared as a guest post initiating Isolation's blog tour at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time.
