How to Really Foul Up a World… On Purpose

By: Reverentia

Earlier in this issue, @AngusEcrivain wrote an article introducing and defining dystopian fiction. In a nutshell, it’s a story where the main character(s) find themselves in opposition to an oppressive or totalitarian society, and struggle against the forces that attempt to annihilate or convert the “non-conformities.”

If that type of plot gives you the itch to try your hand writing science fiction in this subgenre, this article will give you pointers to get you started.

A dystopian story’s primary conflict is usually person vs. society. If your story is complex, it will likely have other types of conflicts as well (person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. nature), but in dystopian science fiction, these will generally be secondary to person vs. society.

To build this kind of story, you’ll definitely need the following:

* A dystopian world or society

* A strong main character

* Fireworks (a.k.a., a plot)

Let’s look at each of these more closely.

Creating a Dystopian World or Society

A dystopian story is defined as such by its setting or social situation, as described above in labeling it as a person vs. society conflict. This setting is therefore not neutral, but is a character in its own right—namely, an antagonist.

Dystopia and sci-fi work so well together because sci-fi is often a commentary on existing society. Sci-Fi writer Thomas Disch believed that sci-fi is not about prediction, but instead uses fictional worlds to critique the existing one. It is therefore both possible and normal to extrapolate current trends into the future. You can generate a dystopian society by following a current negative trend down a hypothetical slippery slope by asking “what-if” questions.

Starting points you could consider include:

* Current events (politics, uprisings like the Arab Spring, religious cults, drug busts, outbreaks, etc).

* Past events (how wars got started, despotic leaders, invasions, etc).

* Magazine articles. Often the ones relating technology to social implications are quite fruitful.

* Population statistics (e.g., demographics of incarcerated people, suicide rates, etc.)

To illustrate the use of “what if” questions, I’ll walk you through how I came up with the dystopian setting in which my TK7 story, Transistence, was set. In this story, national governments had become completely powerless in the face of corporations, to the point that countries ceased to exist and people were citizens of corporations. Losing one’s job essentially meant losing all rights – including ones we consider “constitutional rights.”

Coming up with this world where corporations had forced national governments out of existence involved asking a few what-if questions based on real recent events here in Canada. In 2012, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPA), with the intention of ratifying it later in Parliament. If ratified, this act would allow a Chinese corporation to sue Canada for damages if Canada enacts legislation that could negatively impact the Chinese corporation’s profits. Similar agreements with other countries already exist and this predicted type of corporate bullying has already started happening. To make matters worse, Canada could pull out of it, but after giving their notice, they’re still bound to it for 31 years. (In comparison, NAFTA is binding for 6 months after pulling out.)

So based on this trend (FIPA leading to corporations suing countries due to “lost profit”), I played a hypothetical what-if game as follows:

What if Canada signed this FIPA (and/or others like it)? They are bound to this contract for at least a generation.

What if Canada then needs to enact legislation to either save resources for Canadians, or to protect the environment and/or the health of its citizens? The corporation whose business is extracting and exporting these resources will threaten to sue Canada.

What if Canada gets sued? The chances of winning this lawsuit are very small. (A similar agreement exists with the US, and Canada has never once won against one of these US corporate lawsuits.)

What if Canada loses? Canadian taxpayers have to pay huge amounts of money to this corporation, making it stronger and Canadians poorer. It also reinforces the fear of such lawsuits among politicians, who will hesitate to attempt to enact any further legislation that may be unpopular with the corporations.

What if the politicians no longer stand up for the people? They are useless. Corporations are now officially running the show.

What’s to stand in the way of greedy corporations abusing this agreement to suck Canada dry of resources? Nothing.

(So far, we’re still more or less in the realm of what’s actually reality, so I changed it up a bit.)

What would it take to get Canada out of this agreement sooner than 31 years from now? Maybe if Canada dissolved, it would no longer be bound to the contract? Not sure. Or there could be an illegal uprising of the people, perhaps resulting in corporate military intervention…

… and so on. By now you can probably see how we’re veering into the realm of dystopia and getting close to the point where on a global scale, countries have been made redundant by corporations through these types of legally binding agreements. Sure, it sometimes takes “worst-case scenario” thinking, but that’s often how dystopias are created—things going wrong in large-scale plans, whether by accident or as masterminded by someone with nefarious intentions.

Putting a Strong Character in the Driver’s Seat

As we discussed earlier, a dystopian story is usually centered on a person vs. society conflict. If you’ve done a good job of creating a dystopian society, chances are the situation surrounding your main character is pretty grim. A totalitarian or oppressive regime is probably in place, and/or perhaps everyone’s every move is being recorded and scrutinized. This means that your character is up against a very powerful antagonistic force, so you’re going to need a strong character to face that force and carry the story. This doesn’t mean that the character has to be built like the Hulk or have unusual superpowers (though those are not excluded), but it does require a character who can tap a deep well of mental fortitude that he or she may not even know is there.

For example, would Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games be the same story if fragile little Prim really did end up at the Games instead of her tomboyish older sister Katniss? Probably not. Prim would likely have been killed in the first three seconds of the Games and there’d be nothing to write home about.

Have a look at a number of dystopian stories and you will see the same pattern – they all have a main character with grit and a willingness to hope for change, knowing what it will cost them. In the Matrix movies, we have Neo; in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, there’s Guy Montag; and in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, there’s Winston Smith. This is not to say the characters are perfect—they aren’t, and shouldn’t be—but they are worthy underdogs that a reader can side with.

Adding a Liberal Amount of Fireworks (Plot)

Where there’s an underdog, there’s a fight. Once you’ve set up a dystopian society or landscape and created a strong main character, the final key element is to set up some form of conflict that pits the two against each other.  If you have a great dystopian world, and a really cool character, but your whole story is about the character watching a dandelion grow out of a crack in the sidewalk, it will be a disappointment.

One way to figure out the driving force behind your plot is to use the Goal, Motivation, Conflict technique laid out by Debra Dixon. Identify these three elements about your character, as follows:

* Goal: What does your character want to achieve? With your character embroiled in a person vs. society conflict, chances are the main goal has to do with undermining or defeating the oppressive system in some way.

* Motivation: Why does your character want to achieve this? (Hint: “Just ‘cause…” is not an appropriate answer. If your story runs out of steam in the middle, this is often the missing piece.)

* Conflict: What’s blocking the character from achieving his/her goal?

Let’s take The Hunger Games as an example most people are familiar with. The main character, Katniss, has a goal of winning the Hunger Games. Why? She has a few motivations. First, winning means staying alive, which is usually a good thing. Furthermore, since she is the breadwinner for the family, it means being around to feed and sustain her beloved sister and mother. Also, it means winning a year’s worth of bonus rations for her impoverished District. The conflict? Obviously, the actual Hunger Games, whose aim is to kill all but one child. Also against her is the corrupted regime that hosts the Hunger Games and maintains the poverty of, and discrimination against her District. Overcoming that would be a tall order for even the spunkiest of sixteen-year-olds, and that’s exactly what makes the story so interesting for so many readers.

The key to making this work is to ensure that the conflict is big enough to generate interest, and that the character’s motivation is powerful enough to fuel that determination and hope mentioned in the last section. After all, the character will need those, as dystopias tend to annihilate or convert “non-conforming” people like, for example, Agent Smith coming after Neo in The Matrix.

In Summary…

To create an awesome dystopian fiction, start by twisting reality until you arrive at a plausible dystopian world. The more plausible, the more eerie and compelling it will be. Next, peg your story on a strong character—strong enough to face this dystopia and stare it in the eye. Finally, set the two against each other in an epic struggle of good vs. evil, hope vs. despair—and you will be well on the way to putting together a great dystopian tale.