ABSTRACT
Dystopia, the negative utopia, is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived” (Sargent 1994: 9). It is not the evacuation of eutopian hope (that belongs to the anti-utopia, which “has steadily attacked and refused Utopia and all that its authors claim for it” (Moylan 2000: 122)), but rather “draws on the more detailed systemic accounts of utopian narratives by way of an inversion that focuses on the terrors rather than the hopes of history” (Moylan 2000: 111) and works “not to undermine Utopia but rather to make room for its reconsideration and refunctioning in even the worst of times” (Moylan 2000: 133).
