Dystopian fiction

Dystopian fiction is the utopia turned over to see how it runs. The older form imagined a well-ordered society and invited the reader to admire it; this one imagines a well-ordered society and follows someone living inside it. The machinery is the same in both. What changes is that the reader is put at the level of a person the machinery is acting on.

The form's distinguishing habit is that it explains itself. A ghost story gains by withholding, but a dystopia has to make its system plausible in working detail, because the argument fails if the reader can see a way out that the characters have missed. That is why these books carry so much apparatus — the rules of a language, the terms of a treaty, the exact ration of chocolate. George Orwell took it furthest: Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with an essay on the grammar of Newspeak, written in the past tense, which quietly reframes everything before it.

The tradition these two books sit in was already established when Orwell wrote them. Yevgeny Zamyatin's We had circulated since the 1920s and Orwell reviewed it in 1946; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World appeared in 1932. What Orwell added was the sense that the system had been arrived at deliberately by people who understood exactly what they were doing. Animal Farm belongs here for the same reason, though it wears the costume of a fable: it works through the founding of a new order step by step, from the principles painted on a wall to the revisions made to them in the night.