Welcome, readers and book lovers! Today we’ll have an open forum, the idea for which grew out of an open forum discussion several weeks ago. We discussed a nonfiction book, The Long Emergency, a vision of the dystopian future that awaits the United States of America, according to James Howard Kunstler.
But first, breakfast! In the United States of Dystopia, fossil-fueled ships bearing delicious coffee beans from South America will no longer cross the sea, so unless you’re lucky enough to live in our fiftieth state, where you can enjoy the very expensive kona, you’ll taste coffee no more. So this morning we’re having coffee made from roasted dandelion roots. Yes, really!
Not only that, with the coffee we’re going to have dandelion fritters, made with the pretty yellow flower heads. Yes, we’re eating and drinking
weed, people! Never mind smokin’ it—we’re going to
subsist on it.
All right, after you’ve choked down this wretched repast, perhaps you can lurch unsteadily after me into the salon, where we will begin the discussion.
The Long Emergency foretells a bleak future. Some of the participants in our open forum discussion agreed with Kunstler’s vision and some did not, finding it either too pessimistic or downright inaccurate. However, it started me thinking: which is your favorite of all the dystopian novels you’ve ever read? I immediately thought of three I've read and will focus on the third one.
The first one I thought of was The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, which I read when it was first published. This novel’s vision of the future was most disturbing: to cite two examples, in Starhawk’s dystopia water is a scarce, highly valued commodity, even used to lure job applicants: “They’ll give me a salary and all the water I can drink.” One of the most unnerving aspects of the story (in my opinion) was the discovery by the narrator of a colony of blond, blue-eyed people who had been bred as living sex toys, but who had escaped and were living in the tunnels underneath a city in the western United States.
The second dystopian novel that sprang to mind was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. After it appeared in the mid-1980s, the reaction of feminists in England and Canada was: “Jolly good tale.” In the USA, the reaction was: “How long have we got?” When I read the book it ruined my day. The film was even worse though, because the absolute horror of the story was magnified by the fact that everything looked so normal—all these awful things were happening in normal-looking suburban neighborhoods, very like the ones we live in now.
The book I chose to discuss was John Wyndam’s The Chrysalids, apparently published in the USA as Rebirth. This novel projects several thousand years into the future, in which the East Coast of America has been reduced to a black, radioactive mass. The action takes place in Labrador, which by this time has become so much warmer that farming is possible.
The narrator is a young man, David, growing up in a large, well-off farm family ruled by a patriarch whose word is law, naturally. Following the “Tribulation” (nuclear war), mutations in humans, animals, and crops have become so common that the patriarchal society in Labrador emphasizes normalcy above all. If a baby is born with six fingers on each hand it’s immediately killed or banished to The Fringes, a sort of wild country beyond the borders of the “good” people. Only mutants live there.
David is a mutant himself but fortunately for him, his mutation does not show. He has prophetic dreams and shares the ability with some young people on neighboring farms to communicate by telepathy. His uncle, a returned sailor, the only one who knows about David's mutation, listens attentively to David's retelling of his strange dreams. He warns his nephew never to tell anyone about the dreams or the telepathy.
To avoid spoiling this excellent tale for those who have yet to experience the pleasure of reading it, I will say no more about the plot.
What disturbs me the most about the three novels I’ve mentioned is the fact that all three dystopias feature extreme patriarchy as the social model. Even Starhawk, that renowned feminist, seems unable to visualize a future society that does not involve contempt for, oppression of, and downright cruelty to, women and children.
Of them all, The Chrysalids is my favorite, not only because of the ending, but because there is a faint glimmer of hope in it—the hope that a better future is possible.
As I’ve aged, I’ve chosen not to distress myself by reading dystopian novels. If I knew of even one in which women enjoy respect and equal opportunity rather than being brutalized, I might possibly consent to read it. But I know of no such book.
What about YOU? What’s your favorite dystopian novel? Is it old or new? What age were you when you discovered it? At the end of the book did you feel deeply thankful that you live now instead of that future? Please tell us about it—the floor is yours!