The Dystopian Novel is Back!

The Dystopian genre, famous for such works as Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx & Crake, Kallocain, We the Living, Atlas Shrugged, WE and many others, has returned, but in a different form. It has evolved somewhat. The two examples I cite are Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse. These novels are not about deplorable living conditions, forced abstinance, or totalitarianism, but are about what happens when we set the world (or America, specifically) on fire. The Road follows a man and his ten-year-old (estimation) son on a journey to the east coast after some unknown disaster (nuclear fallout?), hoping for some remnant of civilization.

Jim Crace's novel, which I've read about in The New York Times (and the first page of the novel) and plan to get for my birthday, according to the reviewer, depicts a degredation of America (Crace is British, where a lot of Dystopian literature came from), where people, instead of moving west (Monroe Doctrine, Gold Rush, promise of land and livlihood), seem to have reaped what they have sown and now there is nothing left but pestilence, and they, again, move from the West to the East, wishing to return to the Fatherland (the father of America). Also, the reviewer pointed out that remnants of "traditional morality" still exist, and all science and history is lost.

I think of The Pesthouse, as according to the NYTimes reviewer, as being, in a sense, correct about America, especially after Tsar Bush II. I, for one, seek to leave the United States, a land of unrestrained greed and powerlust without regard to consequence, and cutthroat competition for the minds of human beings, a war so violent, few people hold their own ideas, or trust them.

Also of note is the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero. Trent Reznor also tells a dystopian tale, but it is not of the recent trend of post-apocalyptic wastelands, rather it is of the urbanite totalitarianism of many other stories past. Year Zero tells a complete story, from what we are now ("Survivalism") to what Crace and McCarthy speak of in their novels ("In This Twilight", "Zero-Sum"), from revolution ("The Good Soldier") to thought-control and justification ("Vessel", "The Greater Good"). The final two songs of the album focuses on either the fulfilment of Christian prophecy or worldwide nuclear fallout. The entire album is focused on a Christian totalitarian theocracy in the United States under a Christian equivalent of Khomeini (the inside flap features a Bible on one side and a submachine gun on the other). While little of what Reznor says is original (it could be imagined by anyone with the ability to judge the future based on the past and present), he tells the story very well and completely.