Dystopias are always popular in science fiction, for a variety of reasons. Number one, of course, is that there’s depressingly little play in being optimistic about the future. People who go around talking about how the future will be awesome and all our problems will be solved get derided as soft-headed hippies, while people who are all doom and gloom about our fate are taken very, very seriously. Number two, dystopias are fun. Utopias are boring. Which is also why we immediately become suspicious whenever a SFF book depicts an apparent utopia—because we figure it’s got to be a ruse, and thus actually a dystopia. Otherwise, why write the damn book?
Dystopias also give the writer a junkyard sandbox to play around in; world-building is tough because you have to figure out how everything works and trace the development of concepts and traditions. But in a dystopia, the world is broken. Things aren’t working correctly. You can smash stuff and leave things unexplained, you can shrug and leave a mess behind and your readers will just assume it’s part and parcel of a broken world (to an extent—there’s always a limit to stuff like this).
Dystopia Now!
But another big reason dystopias are effective is the shock factor. You’re going about your day, living in a world that is far from perfect and which is filled with injustice, but isn’t precisely a dystopia—yet. And then you start reading and suddenly you’re faced with a world where everything has been perverted and ruined, where basic human rights are discarded and everything is terrible. It’s like walking into WalMart.
Because in real life, dystopias happen gradually. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find fascist troops outside your door instructing you to donate your mandatory spittle quota to the Great Leader. That’s the end of a decade or three of slow frog-boiling. In real life, you never notice the dystopia you’re living in because it just creeps up on you. When you crack open a book, suddenly you’re dropped into a dystopia and it’s a shock. A horrifying shock that transmits power from your story directly to the reader. When handled well it’s an incredibly effective moment.
The difficulty comes in maintaining that shock and channeling the energy of it to the plot. When a reader starts your story and experiences that rush of virtual anxiety that comes from experiencing a dystopian society, you’ve got to take that response and use it to push them forward in your story. If you don’t get them involved in the story quickly, the shock dissipates. They get used to the horrorshow of a society you’ve presented them with. This happens in real life, too; even when society’s decline happens in a fairly sudden, stomach-flipping lurch, people find ways to define a new normal and get their sea legs, and the frog boiling begins again.
Please note I don’t encourage you to actually boil any frogs. Even in the name of science! that’s kind of horrible.