From The Paris Review:
A curious feature of most dystopian fiction is that it begins in medias res. It’s a stylistic convention of the genre, and it applies to most dystopian lit that comes to mind, from Nineteen Eighty-Fourto Brave New World to Never Let Me Go. As pure narrative strategy, it makes sense. After all, novels in general must hook a reader quickly, and there are few things hookier than unfolding disaster. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, for example, begins with twenty utterly gripping pages of the first hours of a superplague wiping out Toronto (and the world). There is something compelling about this type of introduction—it carves narrative down to a brutal logic in which the only two options are survival or death.
The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which will wrap up its second season in July, is the most recent popular example of this phenomenon. The viewer is dropped, from the first episode, into the fresh hell of Gilead, alongside Elizabeth’s Moss’s Offred. We are given the broad strokes of how Gilead came to power (ecological disaster, plummeting birthrates, a coup in Congress), but only the occasional flashback to “normal life” before the coup, when the show’s world much resembled ours. The first season was released in April, 2017, and Offred’s disoriented struggle felt topical, consonant with an American body politic waking up to the reality of the Trump era. My wife and I watched it, as I know so many people did, with rapt, grim fascination. It showed our worst fears about the new government dramatized.
As time—and the show—has gone on, however, I found myself increasingly drawn to the scanty scenes of America before Gilead, the tender, doomed moments of Offred’s previous life. The glimpses of that hazy, vanishing world are the most painful, and perhaps the most resonant with our own unfolding dystopia. Because this is what all dystopias—fictional and real—specialize in: erasure of what came before.
. . . .
Too often, I think, we want our fictional dystopias to protect us against the real thing.. As Alyssa Rosenberg says in this Washington Post article, “Dystopian fiction—and any fiction, really—shouldn’t be judged by the extent to which it serves as a bulwark against actual, radical changes to American society. It is enough to ask that a story be entertaining and well-executed, and that its characters be rich and memorable.”
But while asking a piece of entertainment to be more than entertaining may be asking too much, baked into most dystopian narratives is an implicit claim to edification. After all, dystopias, like utopias, succeed or fail based on how convincingly and relevantly they correspond to the real world. Both words share the root topos, place in Greek, and purport to tell us about the possibilities of our own place through fictional exaggeration. It therefore seems reasonable to expect that they might tell us not only about the mess we’re in, but how we got into it, and how to escape.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review
I think it’s ironic that in most dystopian stories where we get a glimpse of how it all began, it’s always conservatives or extremely religious people who bring about the dystopian totalitarian society. But in our present-day experience, we’re seeing that it’s the “progressive” leftists, with their attempts to control speech and thought in the name of diversity and “tolerance,” who are actually steering us all toward a dictatorial dystopian future.
In SERENITY it was clear that the central worlds were run by holier than thou meddlers.
RIVER
People don’t like to be meddled
with. We tell them what to do,
what to think, don’t run don’t
walk we’re in their homes and in
their heads and we haven’t the
right. We’re meddlesome.
TEACHER
(gently taking her STYLUS)
River, we’re not telling people
what to think. We’re just trying
to show them how.
http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Serenity.html
(Somewhat ironic given Whedon’s recent meltdowns.)
Felix, that is just the “Totalitarian government, one each” trope. (If this is not an official one, it should be – I hereby license it as CC-BY-3.0 – use it as you wish, but I want credit…).
Depending on your ideology, you can interpret the Central Worlds as Leftist meddlers or Rightist meddlers. (There isn’t actually very much difference between the two in methods; only over what people should think. Or how they should think. Or who should be allowed to have a head to think with.)
Yes, it is totalitarian thinking but it is a trait of both the modern “left” and the Central Worlds that they *need* to paint themselves as “the good guys” trampling over people for “their own good”.
In contrast, the other camp is presented as straightforwardly/crudely self-serving, ala Hunger Games. President Snow, for one.
No self-delusion, which was Whedon’s point in that scene.
You have to remember that when the guys running the publishing industry were in their formative years, conservatives and extremely religious people had a lot of cultural power.
Now, the situation has changed, of course, but it’s hard to realize that the world has changed, and that YOU are the establishment now.