What do works like Metropolis , The Best of Worlds , Fahrenheit 451 , Blade Runner , Mad Max , or even Black Mirror and The Handmaid's Tales have in common ? We mean, apart from having spawned you with existential anxieties ... These are dystopias. These works, books or films, for example, tell of imaginary societies that have turned into a nightmare. Jean-Pierre Andrevon, recognized science fiction author and journalist, signs an Anthology of dystopias . He describes in the menu the various threats that these works summon and which hover over our reality: dictatorships, cataclysms, uprising of machines, idiocracy, eugenics ...
For 20 Minute s, he returns to the power, and the contemporaneity of this genre brought up to date by the success of the series The Handmaid's Tales .
Is dystopia a fashionable genre since the success of series like Black Mirror or The Handmaid's Tales ?
I do not believe. There is hardly any novel of dystopia which appears. Dystopia is a subject which has always interested science fiction but which has never been very popular.
Why ?
We never want to hear bad news! Science fiction as a whole is a rather pessimistic literary genre. Or lucid ... And for some time now, SF has been diluted in the great genre of fantasy.
Where does the story of dystopia come from?
Dystopia is a response to utopia, an inverted utopia. Utopia was invented by 18th century philosophers and thinkers who sought to imagine the best form of government. In their "ideal" societies, egalitarianism is misleading and often leads to dictatorships. Dystopia is an applied utopia. It describes a society that wants to make its members happy despite themselves, against them. Dystopia is about accepting the unacceptable. And so, the work poses the insoluble question: What is a human being? What can we accept as humans?
Is that why many dystopias describe totalitarian societies?
Yes, this model has been a lot. But today, it is no longer the Stalinist dictatorship that threatens us. Today, the danger is the runaway climate, the depletion of resources, pollution ... The villains of a dystopia today would be climatosceptics. If the dangers vary, the springs of dystopia remain the same.
To know ?
When you write a story, you need ingredients that the reader expects. Heroes who shape history or are shaped by it, in particular. In dystopias, we often see groups rather than lone heroes. But in a dystopia, real heroism is the awareness of a group, which causes a reaction. However, their actions are not necessarily successful. What is interesting are the failures.
Heroes are easy to identify in dystopia. The bad guys a lot less. Why ?
In dystopias, it is often unclear who governs. Just as in our world it is the economy that governs, the tyrants of dystopias are not identified people. The ecological danger, like the dangers of capitalism, is difficult to express because it is more diffuse than a cataclysm or a war. You have to use subterfuges. Fantastic literature uses figures like that of the zombie as a metaphor for the disintegration of our societies. Science fiction has used the figure of the robot, the blind creation of the man who turns against him, to represent those things that we no longer master because we are no longer interested in them. Dystopia uses politics. The question posed by dystopias is "what do we choose as a society". The worst dystopias are those that are valiantly accepted by those who experience it without realizing it.
This is the case in The Servant Scarlet , a novel which has been adapted in series under the name The Handmaid's Tales .
It is a very interesting dystopia based on religion. Another science fiction theme is added: an epidemic, which here makes humanity infertile. And so, there is a dystopia inside the religious dystopia which is that of the status of women, reduced to slavery.
We have accused certain dystopian stories of imagining the worst, and therefore, in a way, of reassuring us about the real state of our societies. When one reads The Scarlet Servant , one can come to say to oneself “the condition of women is not so bad after all” in reality.
I don't know, maybe ... I still believe that when we see the acuity of a dystopian work, it increases the anxiety in the drifts of our society. As a reader of The Scarlet Servant , I am afraid that the path leading to it is before us. Dystopian novels are lessons. Like history.
The story ?
Yes. Everything happened. The 20th century is a formidable reservoir of dystopias. The eugenic society at work in Bienvenue à Gattaca , a recent high-quality futuristic dystopia, has already happened in history. Believing to tell the future, we often tell the past.
Isn't writing, or reading, a dystopia a scary game?
The job of a writer is to manage to grab the reader. We are always fascinated by evil.
But is there a prophetic dimension in dystopian works?
We are not prophets, no. But, and I am a little sorry to see it because it is not very good news, the science fiction authors interested in dystopias have often been right… The science fiction authors are whistleblowers . I'm not saying that SF has planned everything, but it has often been lucid. Metropolis , in 1926, anticipated many things about alienation at work, about the richest who escaped the effects of pollution, about the advent of blind power…
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