ABSTRACT
Dystopian fiction offers a vision of a future train wreck, but one that provides temporal safety: “We haven't quite reached that point,” we say with relief. “Not yet. And maybe we won't with due diligence.” Fredric Jameson refers to dystopia as “a ‘near future’ novel [that] tells the story of an imminent disaster—ecology, overpopulation, plague, drought, the stray comet or nuclear accident—waiting to come to pass in our own near future, which is fast-forwarded in the time of the novel.” 1 Lyman Tower Sargent offers a similar definition. “The traditional dystopia,” writes Sargent, “was an extrapolation from the present that involved a warning.… The dystopia … says if you behave thus and so, this is how you will be punished.” 2 Sargent continues with what has become a frequently quoted definition. He characterizes the dystopia as “a non-existent society … normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived.” 3 For Jameson, Sargent, and many other scholars, dystopias are cautionary tales set in a future with recognizable features.
