An Example of a Dystopian Short Story
The dystopian genre can be varied and crossed with many other genres. It is this, along with the foundations of the idea of dystopian, that give writer’s such a wide scope of imagination and possibility. Dystopian romance. Dystopian horror. Dystopian fantasy. Dystopian fairy tale. We could go on.
So what factors makes a story dystopian? There are a lot of answers, but a few include:
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- Disturbing.
- Within our reach (a potential future).
- Parallels to our reality.
- Unsettling.
Some, or all of these can apply to a story within this genre, but as always, the power lies with the writer and the unnerving tales they conjure up.
In Machinations by Shira Hereld, featured in Broken Worlds: Dystopian Stories we read about a husband and wife who keep a ‘collection’ of servo androids. The story focuses on a loss of family values, the hollow pursuit of ‘keeping up with the Jones’’ and a disconnection from true and valuable life experiences.
The two main characters lust after their androids in their own secret ways, admiring the unattainable levels of beauty, perfection and innocence the robots hold. It takes them away from the monotony of what their lives have become. Humans have become lazy with bad hygiene. They want the best house, money and more androids than the neighbours have. Family, friends, experience, love – the real things that make life important have fallen by the wayside.
Of course, the themes of this short story affect us in such a way because perhaps we can see something of ourselves and our world within the characters Hereld has created. We’ve all been sucked in by the draw of technology – the ease with which we can now perform certain tasks with a phone or tablet, the time lost spent staring into cyber space when we could have been doing something better and more productive. We’ve all compared ourselves and our lives to film stars and perfect airbrushed models that just aren’t real.
Dystopian stories strike fear in a reader when they begin to see signs of a terrifying future in their own present. It is a dark and unsettling wake-up call to look at the world we live in and really live in it, before we too fall by the wayside.