No More Dystopian Fiction, Please
Okay, so there’s this show on HBO called Years and Years that I finished a week before I moved to Bogotá. (Hay spoilers acá!) For those of you that don’t know anything about it, it’s about right now. Here. Our future. The escalating, forcibly made dystopia that’s unfolding on our screens. Donald Trump gets re-elected for a second term. The polar ice caps melt. Our refugee crisis becomes genocidal. All of it is predicted in this show, and so much more. The show forces us to watch a single family deal with the rapid changes happening in the world, and how powerless they are to stop it. Every episode jumps ahead a couple more years into the future, where we see the burning landfill become even bigger.
I could not stop watching it. I also told my family to watch it.
I knew what I was in for before I even started, so I read spoilers before each episode. Reading it in text was supposedly easier than experiencing the moving images. It still wasn’t easy. I spent the entire week thinking about the ways in which my family in Miami was just like the one in the TV show: waiting for something better to happen, allowing events to pass like traffic, later wondering how we got to a dead end.
At the time, I was wondering if there’s certain things that can’t be unlearned. Perhaps “unlearning” isn’t really the right word – it’s the feeling that certain things can’t be unknown. You can’t unknow what’s going on right now. Even if you deactivate your accounts, turn off your TV, and go hide in a ravine for the rest of your living days, there is still the knowledge that our world is probably going to die.
It was then that I realized: I kind of hate this show.
Years and Years has nothing to contribute to the conversation. It is all warning, no solution. There is an inkling of a solution that’s presented to us at the very end of the show, when the characters decide to fight back and incite a revolution against their overwhelmingly oppressive government – but by then, it’s a little too late. Islands have already been submerged in polar ice water, and the world’s refugees have already been placed in concentration camps.
It could be argued that there’s something inspirational to be found in the fact that it’s the story of a simple family that decided to take action (pero like…towards the end), which is meant to show that we are capable of overcoming our own struggles. But this is also being shown through an undeniably affluent lens where the main characters have generational wealth in the form of a house that catches them as a safety net from poverty, and good ol’ white granny money that brushes off minor issues like blindness.
But that’s not what frustrates me about most of the dystopian writing I encounter. It’s something else entirely: it’s always about how far down the well you are. It’s never about how to climb out of it, how to find joy and community in oppressive times, or how to simply trust in your own community. If I think about the function of the oppression in our lives, it seems as if it is designed to kill your own joy – after all, if your life is devoid of pleasure, then what’s the point of even trying? Better that you deteriorate into your own nihilism, the only certainty in life being that you are getting screwed over in every way possible.
It often feels like the only political voice worth listening to is adrienne maree brown: a writer, activist, community organizer, and doula. There’s a decent chance you’ve encountered her work already, but if you haven’t, please close your laptop, turn off your screen, and read a copy of Emergent Strategy. It will save your life. brown writes a lot about dystopia, often asking tough questions about how we can end our cycle of entering political battles for the sake of simply “winning” against our oppressors, how we can find joy and pleasure even in the midst of dystopia, and how we can organize and build movements from of a place of love rather than scarcity.
brown draws much inspiration from the work of Octavia Butler: the first black female science-fiction writer to ever win major awards like the Hugo Award or the McArthur Fellowship. I can’t shut up about either of them. brown and Butler both write about dystopia in a way that feel…inspirational. Not fake inspirational, like a final-episode plot development in Years and Years, but actually inspirational. In their version of dystopia, the oppression is still there, but you have the tools to overcome it. I still remember this conversation from Parable of the Sower, a dystopian novel by Butler. Here, the main character Lauren Olamina is talking to her friend Joanne about how she is preparing for the worst outcome:
“Iʼm trying to learn whatever I can that might help me survive out there. I think we should all study books like these. I think we should bury money and other necessities in the ground where thieves wonʼt find them. I think we should make emergency packs—grab and run packs—in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Money, food, clothing, matches, a blanket… I think we should fix places outside where we can meet in case we get separated. Hell, I think a lot of things. And I know—I know!—that no matter how many things I think of, they wonʼt be enough. Every time I go outside, I try to imagine what it might be like to live out there without walls, and I realize I donʼt know anything.”
Here, we see that the Lauren is taking agency into her own hands. We can even see signs of a step-by-step process of how to survive: begin with research, amass knowledge, then put it into practice. It even shows what might happen when people resist reality and sit in denial, such as Joanne or her own father:
“Things are changing now, too. Our adults havenʼt been wiped out by a plague so theyʼre still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and theyʼll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now theyʼre waiting for the old days to come back.”
“Your father says he doesnʼt believe people changed the climate in spite of what scientists say. He says only God could change the world in such an important way.”
“Do you believe him?”
She opened her mouth, looked at me, then closed it again. After a while, she said, “I donʼt know.”
“My father has his blind spots,” I said. “Heʼs the best person I know, but even he has blind spots.”
“It doesnʼt make any difference,” she said. “We canʼt make the climate change back, no matter why it changed in the first place. You and I canʼt. The neighborhood canʼt. We canʼt do anything.”
I lost patience. “Then letʼs kill ourselves now and be done with it!”
In this conversation between the main character and her friend, we see a familiar pattern of denial that I see in other people, even myself. It exists in Years and Years as well. But unlike Parable of the Sower, Years and Years places us in an indoor jacuzzi of our own denial where we never get to see how we got here – let alone how to overcome it. I might actually take back everything I’m saying about Years and Years if there’s a second season that actually goes backward in time: instead of going 15 years into the future, we go 15 years into the past, where we examine root causes of what allowed the apocalypse to happen.
And yet…we come upon a contradiction, amigxs. Even with everything I just said about dystopian fiction, I can’t deny that I really, really want to take a crack at the genre myself. For years I’ve been wanting to write a dystopian novel that explores materialism, racism, and sexual politics in queer communities, but something about brown or Octavia’s work gives me pause. (And I’ll also admit it’s less about wanting to take a crack at the genre, and more about wanting to take a crack at white gays, but I think that’s a separate post.)
Initially, my impulse was to dig the grave so deep that no light comes in. But I began to think about my responsibility as an artist, who I’m writing for, and I wonder: if I’m showing everyone how fucked we are, am I just replicating another flawed system without providing ideas for how to tear it down? I’ve always believed it’s an artist’s responsibility to ask questions, not give answers, but I have to admit that I’m stuck on this one.
What I do know is this: when I was 12, I was reading 1984, and a lot of adults thought it was strange that I would read a book like that. Maybe they thought it was an absolute downer, and that a child like me should be reading something else. But 12 year-old me knew what The Darkness was, and that sometimes you need to stare into it, see that life is meaningless, and then begin forming your own shapes in that Darkness. If you close your eyes long enough, the pressure of your eyelids against your retinas creates whatever shapes you like. And you can transpose any meaning onto those squiggles so that your own hardship, in turn, becomes an opportunity - the same way Lauren read about survival techniques in her fledgling community in order to create her own. The Darkness was never bad for you after all, you never learned how to appreciate its secrets.