This year, I decided to play the summer reading game, and, since I'm planning to do a workshop on how to put together a dystopia, I decided to refresh myself on the genre classics.
My reaction to the classics is... mixed.
First, credit where it's due, Anthony Burgess is awesome at creating slang in Clockwork Orange. Seriously good at it. (And it's a trick writers shouldn't try in public until they've mastered it, honestly -- that's difficult stuff.) Nadsat is a work of genius. And of the classic dystopias I've been reading, I definitely like this one best. Of the protags, Alex is the most compelling, even if he's deeply evil. Because he has a discernible personality, at least.
Yeah. That's pretty much the problem. Alex is distinctly unlikeable, but Orange was the only one of the dystopias that actually had a functioning character in the central role. Granted, I'm a big one for theme -- I love theme -- but 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World... all of these books struck me as not much more than theme as extrapolated through setting, with characters existing only because the author needed someone to view the setting. In each case, the theme was important -- the manipulation of language and history from Orwell, the distraction and dumbing down from Bradbury, the hyper-controlled genetic experimentation and consumption from Huxley -- but it felt more like listening to a preacher tell a barely-crafted parable than actually reading a novel. (Animal Farm, ironically, was much more of a human experience.)
And... how to put this...
Reading these classic bits of SF has really given me a window into why SF was talked about as a men's genre. Orange is blatantly and violently misogynist, though that's chalked up as a fault in the viewpoint character in the end... sort of. The others are... well, women are invisible, except insofar as they have an impact on the men who the story is about. Orwell's Julia is a deeply unpleasant woman who exists only as a catalyst for the just as empty Winston. I literally can't remember the names of two women that Bradbury's Montag interacts with (one his wife, the other a neighbor girl). And BNW has Linda (a drunk who proves the downfall of Bernard's boss) and Lenina, a complete and utter blank slate who exists to be lusted over by Bernard and John Savage. (I do have a kind of weird desire to do the intellectual exercise of flipping it -- to give women the agency to have wrecked the world all on our own, and have men play only the kinds of tangential roles that we see here... basically, I wonder what a world as hyper-feminine as Clockwork Orange is hyper-masculine could be made to look like... but it would have the same ultimate problem: It's a thesis, not a story.)
Even that, I could forgive, but the men they orbit are built of pretty flimsy cardboard, too. They're all of a certain stereotypical cast (Alex aside) -- virile smart men who gruffly state truths that ought to be written in stone. Upstanding, but put-upon, people who, one understands, are right. They may be weak (Bernard) or breakable (Winston), but nothing about them really leads to seeing them as humans at all. You can imagine them as square-jawed realists, staring into the face of Truth and being so tough that they can accept it when the rest of the world of dandified and fortunate people have to reject it...
In other words, plain old male nerd fantasy, thus giving rise to the idea that SF is a club for male nerds.
So I'm going to go ahead and say it: Dystopia has improved.
It owes a lot to these classics, which initially paved the way, but it's evolved to include actual, you know, STORY. Things happening to people you have some reason to care about.
This is not to downplay the importance of theme. But theme happens whether you spend your time building it or not. To paraphrase Stephen King (from somewhere in On Writing or Danse Macabre, maybe both), stories throw off meaning like uranium throws off radiation. And if you have much of a story, if you've spent blood and sweat and tears writing it, the damned thing's got to be about something. Let theme happen on its own. The stories turn out better if it's not the first thing on your mind.
The ideas are amazing. Orwell was quite prescient, and the things he invented (Big Brother Is Watching, the memory hole, newspeak, etc) are permanent parts of the culture. Both Bradbury and Huxley were great at spotting our distract-ourselves-to-death culture. Burgess's questions about both evil and mind control in the attempt to stop evil are smart and worth asking. My problem is just with the novels as novels.
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