Literarally Dystopian

Languages, unlike math, are not static. Languages are more like a garden and, even a well-tended garden, grows and changes. Arithmetic, for instance, will always be the stable path through the garden. Two plus two will always equal four. No matter what words we may happen to use for those terms.

I hate to say it, but I'm sure I contributed, back in the 80s and early 90s, to what has happened with the word "literally." [By the way, that word in the title is not or supposed to be "literally." It is what it's spelled as.] When I was teenager and in my early 20s, I loved to use the word ironically. For instance, after a visit to Niagara Falls in the middle of winter without proper protective gear (I had literally never been anywhere where I couldn't deal with the cold, which includes skiing in Colorado), my ears froze and, as I would say, literally fell off my head (You know, it was a take on "I froze my ass off," but I would say "I froze my ears off"). I would follow that up with, "No, seriously. I froze them off and had to super glue them back on." See, it was ironic because the followup was completely unexpected.

So, now, due to continued misuse, "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively," its exact opposite on the color wheel. This is like how some people believe that "no" means "no" but, sometimes, it also means "yes." But we tell those people they're wrong, that "no" always means "no." Maybe, we need to launch a "literally" means "literally" campaign.

Which brings me to dystopians and why I hate the concept of them just like I hate the constant misuse of the word literally. Our current understanding of the word is that it means the opposite of utopian. In fact, the more common term used to be anti-utopian (that's what Brave New World was called when it was released back in the 1930s), which makes it sound like that's what it should be. By that logic (current logic), dystopian means something that is a horrible place to live (and, you know, we'd have to call so many places on Earth, right now, dystopias if that's really what it meant). But, if you look at books like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, you will see that those societies were not horrible places to live. So why do we call those books dystopians when they are nothing like the dystopian books of today? Because we no longer use the word as it was originally intended.

Let's take the apple as an example. Here is a nice apple that looks like an apple should:

We'll call this the Utopia Apple. The perfect apple. You want to eat it, right?

Our current understanding of dystopia is this:

This is not the apple you want to eat. It's rotten, and you can see that it's rotten. You don't want to live there.

However, the original understanding of dystopia was more like this:

From the outside, it looks fine. It looks good. It's only when you get into it that you can see that there's something wrong with it. The idea of a dystopia was that it looked like a utopia from the outside. Everyone seemed fine and happy, or at least content, and secure. It wasn't until you got inside that you could see that there was something inherently wrong with the society.

That's the power of a book like Brave New World. The people within the society are happy. Even the slaves. They like the way they live. There are only a few that even have an idea that there might be something wrong, and they don't know what it is, just that something doesn't seen quite right. It's bringing in outsider that the rottenness is brought to light at all.

Somehow, during the 80s (yeah, we're back there again) and the surge of post-apocalyptic literature, it became synonymous with dystopian literature and it just kinda stuck even though the two started out as two separate things, kind of like figuratively and literally. So, yeah, just as I don't like that we feel compelled use literally for something it shouldn't mean, I don't like that we feel compelled to use dystopian for something it shouldn't mean.

And, yes, it gives me an automatic negative bias against anything "dystopian" written after, probably, 1980. It may be that Fahrenheit 451 was the last true dystopian written for all I know.

What I do know is that I got tired of reading post-apocalyptic stories back in the 80s, and I have no interest in them now. I especially have no interest in reading post-apocalyptic stories being tossed around as dystopian, like Hunger Games. I mean, come on, that society looks rotten from the outside. The only case you can make for it as a true dystopian is if you only look at the Capitol, but that is a city, not the society.

Now that I've said all of that: None of that is to say that I just won't read dystopian or post-apocalyptic stories. It is to say that I'm starting out with a bias against them. If you want to write a dystopian story, make it a real dystopian story. If you just want to write about people living in horrible conditions, write about Afghanistan or Somalia. And if you want post-apocalyptic... well, I don't know. I suppose I feel like that's been done to death, so you're gonna have to convince me. Or at least ask nicely.