A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence and/or terror, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain.
Dystopias share the negative characteristic of being undesirable societies[citation needed] Described as “dangerous and alienating future societies,” a fictional dystopia serves to critique then-current actual cultural trends observed by its author. It is a culture where the condition of life suffers from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
Many dystopias found in fictional and artistic works can be described as a utopian society with at least one fatal flaw, whereas a utopian society is founded on the good life, a dystopian society’s dreams of improvement are overshadowed by stimulating fears of the “ugly consequences of present-day behavior.” People are alienated and mostly the individualism is restricted by the government.
Fictional dystopias may impose severe social restrictions on the characters’ lives, involving social stratification, whereby social class is strictly defined and enforced, and social mobility is non-existent. In the novel Brave New World’, by Aldous Huxley, the class system is prenatally designated in terms of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, people are permitted to live out of public view for only an hour a day. They are not only referred to by numbers instead of names, but are neither “citizens” nor “people”, but “ciphers.” In the lower castes, in Brave New World, single embryos are “bokanovskified”, so that they produce between eight and ninety-six identical siblings, making the citizens as uniform as possible.
Some dystopian works emphasize the pressure to conform in terms of the requirement to not excel. In these works, the society is ruthlessly egalitarian, in which ability and accomplishment, or even competence, are suppressed or stigmatized as forms of inequality, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron. Similarly, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the dystopia represses the intellectuals with particular force, because most people are willing to accept it, and the resistance to it consists mostly of intellectuals. Moreover, in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the protagonist Dagny Taggart struggles to keep Taggart Transcontinental (the railroad corporation where she works) thriving in a world that spurns innovation and excellence.
