DYSTOPIA NOW: WHY LOOKING BACK TO THE PAST MAY BE THE FUTURE

DYSTOPIA NOW: WHY LOOKING BACK TO THE PAST MAY BE THE FUTURE

by Neil Randall

The novel, probably more than any other art form, has always had a unique relationship with technological and scientific progress. In many respects, writers have been chroniclers of not just the times in which they live but of a future world they envisage, and how that world and everything in it will impinge upon or enhance our freedoms, alter our everyday lives, dazzle or terrify our minds. In turn, readers have been fascinated by these propositions, predictions, strange new worlds, concepts, unrealities, whereby the very essence of humanity is repositioned, redefined, and, ultimately challenged.

   In Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, for example, he predicts that man will take his earthly problems into outer space, that there are inescapable questions about the human condition, our mortality, relationships with each other, that even accession into the stars cannot reconcile.

   From the pages of Philip K. Dick many technological/scientific advances (things which seemed fantastical at the time of writing)–the internet, people taking part in dehumanizing game shows for a better life, D.N.A. cloning, robots performing household tasks, designer drugs replacing love–are described, outlined, and utilized.

   To use an example from another medium: In The Entire History of You, part of the acclaimed Black Mirror television series, the characters use in-built recording devices, like personal video cameras, to record every single thing that happens, allowing them to play back certain scenes from their lives–a far from improbable proposition, in many ways the logical progression for a generation of I-phone users who capture events as they happen, uploading them to social media sites within seconds–a phenomenon which has completely revolutionized the way the news itself is reported today.

   This kind of new technology is used to great effect by Steig Larsson in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. After protagonist Lisbeth Salander suffers a violent sexual assault, she covertly films the next encounter (with a camera concealed in a rucksack), records what turns out to be an incredibly sadistic rape, and uses it to blackmail the perpetrator in the future, thus turning the tables and securing her personal freedom.

   I could go on and on.

   But in recent years many renowned novelists (Haruki Murakami in 19Q4 is a good example, so too the works of Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions, Oracle Night, Leviathan) have made a conscious shift from this once fertile artistic ground, setting novels in eras (all of the above novels are set in the 1980's) not quite so dominated by new technology. Is this merely better story-telling terrain, nostalgia, coincidence, lazy plotting, shying away from the very real problems society faces, as their literary forebears have done for generations? Or is there something far more worrying, far more sinister afoot? Has modern society become so oppressive, the atmosphere so stifling, that it has started to infect the artistic world, the creative mind? Are, even the greatest writers running scared, fearful and persecuted like Kafka's Josef K?  

   To illustrate the point, an aspiring writer decides to have a stab at a commercial thriller. When planning the opening scene, the writer runs into a few basic issues which interrupt the natural flow and development of the story. The scene: a man returns to a table in a bar, his girlfriend has disappeared–a standard plotline, done many times before. And thus starts the frantic search, of the bar, the streets outside, the panicky questioning of staff etc. But things have moved on at such an exponential rate since say, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, that the protagonist's actions (that of a fictional character) have to be uniformed, otherwise the situation would be rendered unbelievable. Firstly, he would try her mobile phone. Solution: he's shunted straight through to voice mail, or, more intriguingly, the line is dead, as if the phone has been disconnected. Secondly, when the police get involved: CCTV cameras, and not just in the pub, but on the streets, the surrounding train stations, airports, which would undoubtedly have picked up her movements. Further down the line, there can be checks on bank cards, passports, computer log-ins. It's got to the point where it is impossible not to leave some sort of trace, where it's harder and harder for a potential criminal to perpetrate any crime.

  Good, say millions of law-abiding citizens, for they can now sleep safer at night. But what we as people currently face, both in the real and creative worlds, now we have reached the point of living in the kind of dystopia once seen as no more than a dark cloud on the horizon, where we are under constant surveillance (much of it self-imposed, citizens tagging themselves on social media sites etc.), where everybody is contactable at any given moment, where our thoughts are policed, is that the technology thought to enhance the life experience has in fact shackled us in ways we once, ironically, only read about in books. And this, as touched on above, has impacted upon normal everyday people, who live (and sadly embrace) these conditions, because it has sucked the very humanness out of them, rendering them functional, bland, one-dimensional, ciphers, glued to their mobile devices, therefore, unsuitable, unappealing vehicles or subject-matter for literary work

   Like many things in life, the cycle, once self-perpetuating, has in fact reversed itself–life (black) mirroring art. Now the nightmare vision of the future is, to a pretty concrete degree, upon us, what had once been a limitless source of mad, wild, speculative fiction, has become constricting, so much so that it has almost strangled the life out of a character or plotline before a writer has even committed anything to paper.

Neil Randall's latest thriller ISOLATION  is out now in paperback and on kindle:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Isolation-heart-stopping-thriller-Shutter-Memento-ebook/dp/B01NBFGF7N/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=