A Century of Dystopia

In A Century of Dystopia, author Steve Shahbazian looks at seven literary dystopian novels: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; High Rise by J.G. Ballard, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and his own Green and Pleasant Land.

In this work, he analyses the ways in which the authors used dystopia to comment on their world. Through study of the authors' own essays, interviews, letters and the historical context in which the novels were written, A Century of Dystopia analyses the allusions, metaphors and references within the works to answer the question: what messages were the authors trying to convey?

Discussing ideas ranging from psychology, sociobiology, utilitarianism, solipsism, Christianity, Freudianism and thermodynamics, A Century of Dystopia finds out how the authors of these iconic dystopias influenced each other and asks us to look at the works again. While many themes from the novels have been discussed at length, many more have been missed or overlooked. Reading these works closely reveals the authors' responses into the great events of the 20th and 21st centuries and that their insights into life go much deeper than we realise.

The history of fiction is a history of the human imagination. Read these essays and find out what did the fictional worlds tell us about the real one.

Volume 1 – Introduction: Why Dystopia?

In the introduction, Steve Shahbazian introduces the concept of dystopia and its relation to utopia, the basic premise of speculative fiction and the different dystopias depicted in the seven novels discussed in the succeeding essays. Although each one involves some form of civilisational "decline and fall," the introduction finds there is no one prototypic dystopia: dystopia is the story of where we fear we might be headed.

A Century of Dystopia – the series