Why Read Dystopic Novels? with Sarah-Beth Gould

Why Read Dystopic Novels?

I am an English teacher, a past homeschool mom, and I run classes for homeschool youth where I live in South Africa.  I’m quite particular about which books we read in my lessons. I make sure they are all good books.  But they aren’t all nice books.  In fact, at times they center on horrible, even evil, beliefs, people and events – and they’re not history novels.  So why do I ask Christian homeschool youth to read, think, discuss, and write about ugly and uncomfortable things that aren’t even real?

Much of what I’m going to say applies to any kind of fiction with difficult content, but dystopic fiction has a unique reason and role.

Why We Write Dystopic Novels

We are created with imagination.  It is part of what makes us uniquely human and part of how we reflect being made in the image of our Creator God. To imagine means “to face” or “to picture oneself” and it is an essential tool for engaging with life from a position of empathy.  E.A. Parish wrote in her Parents' Review article "Imagination as a Powerful Factor in a Well-Balanced Mind" that as children learn and come to care about real and make-believe things and ideas, they need imagination to see them from another’s perspective.

For imagination is born of love, and it is only through love that the child comes out of himself and looks at things as they are, apart from his ego. It is only through love that he will forget himself till his visualization is peopled by others than himself (Parish 1914).‍

Dystopic novels are fertile soil for the growth of humility and empathy. Dystopia is a subgenre of science fiction where the authors have imagined what the world of the future might look like – and it’s rarely pretty.  (Dystopia basically means an ‘imaginary bad place’.)  Writing is a thinking exercise, and dystopia provides a form for the imagined answers to hard questions.

"Dystopic novels are fertile soil for the growth of humility and empathy." 

What if government control is lived out to its fullest extreme?  What if we have the technology to control climate, at least for some? What if AI becomes sentient?  What if the world returns to feudalism and monasticism?  What if class and labour divisions become distinctly binary?

We imagine such possibilities for the joy of invention and innovation.  We are made to be curious, to question, and to create.  But we also imagine scenarios like this because we care. We are concerned about our present and want to live well, and better, in the future.  

Criteria for a Dystopic Novel

Dystopic novels are subject to the same criteria as all other pieces of literature – they must be living books: quality, well-written books that spark interest, can be narrated, and are not pedantic in their message.  In her sixth volume Towards A Philosophy of Education, Mason warns about books that do not provide for a student’s intellectual growth: “Again, if they are too easy and too direct, if they tell him straight away what he is to think, he will read, but he will not appropriate” (Mason 1925, 303).  

A good dystopic novel leaves a lot for the reader to discern, evaluate, and decide on. We do, however, need to keep an eye on how a dystopic novel presents morality.  As authors imagine a new world, new technologies, new creatures, or new natural laws, they must not imagine a new moral code. This does not mean the created world needs to adhere to Biblical values – I can guarantee that it won’t – but that the consequences and final outcomes should support a clear morality.  

Is evil ultimately presented as such?  Is the worthy struggle for good upheld in the end, even if it doesn’t succeed?

"This does not mean the created world needs to adhere to Biblical values ...but that the final outcomes should support a clear morality."

As author and pastor George MacDonald (1824-1905) wrote in his essay "The Fantastic Imagination," a writer may invent any kind of imaginary physical world they please, but this is not the case for the story’s moral world.

In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing.  He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. … The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offense to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless.  In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey – and take their laws with him into his invented world as well (MacDonald 1973, 24-25).‍

While our youth must not be told what to think about the invented world’s morals or ethics, neither should they be left to do this complex work of discerning and evaluating on their own.  Parents and teachers, our role is essential in the world of dystopia.  

"While our youth must not be told what to think about the invented world’s morals or ethics, neither should they be left to do this complex work of discerning and evaluating on their own."

Our students need us to come alongside them in the “delightful commerce of equal minds where[ours] is the part of guide, philosopher and friend” (Mason, 1925, 237).

Preparing to Read Dystopic Novels

A well-written dystopic novel is, first of all, a good story worth our engagement.  We do not need to analyse every point being made or warning being given to enjoy it.  

But we do need to prepare ourselves to be uncomfortable.  Dystopic novels use the literal metaphor: a literal object, creature, or action in the created world of the story is a representation of something in our world.   And those metaphors are meant to be a source of discomfort and critique.  

At times that discomfort and its source in the novel are obvious, but not always.  Some aspects of these imagined worlds can feel oddly attractive. Who wouldn’t want a government that regulates almost all pain and danger?  Who wouldn’t want a security system that made catching all criminals easy?  The youth must consider the outcomes of the conflicts and characters in the novel (always very telling), reflect on their own lived experience (so far!), apply their Christian worldview, and then do the fitting work of discerning what is right and wrong.

Yet other aspects of a dystopic world are stark and can even create a visceral repulsion.  At these moments we are tempted to abandon the story – why would we want to put such images and ideas in our minds?  Dystopic stories imagine current, harmful beliefs and practices carried out to their potential conclusions, and false ideas imagined into fuller reality can be outright evil.

Is it still worthwhile to read such literature?

Reading Dystopia to Live Faithfully

Everyone feels worried or even despondent at times by what we see and experience in our world.  I live in South Africa, one of the most violent (and most beautiful!) nations, and it is unsettling.  But it is good and natural to feel this way as a Christian. Things are not as God intended them to be or how God wants them to remain.  

But it is difficult to clearly define what is unsettling and engage in a tangible response.  Our daily lives and relationships, our norms and traditions, and our means of survival are entangled in the here and now.  It’s hard to know how to live faithfully each day as followers of Jesus, never mind having a vision for the future.

Normal fiction that takes place in the real world is constrained by what is possible and plausible. But dystopia gifts us with an imaginary space distanced from our daily reality where we can more readily consider responses to what is wrong with the world.   It is a space where we and our youth learn how to wrestle with the harsher outworkings of sin and selfishness and then consider a faithful response.

"Dystopia gifts us with an imaginary space distanced from our daily reality where we can more readily consider responses."

Dystopic novels aren’t a cozy cup of hot chocolate.  They wake us, shake us, and remind us that we are in desperate need of the truth and light of the Gospel.  The ultimate question of every dystopic novel– What if instead of bettering humanity and the planet, we end up destroying them? - is ultimately answered in and through Jesus.  By his Spirit and for his glory, we engage in the hopeful, hard work of deciding what it looks like to live fully and well today, tomorrow, in any and every circumstance. It is not easy and not comfortable, but it is good and beautiful, and dystopic novels help us on our way.  

References

MacDonald, George. “The Fantastic Imagination.”  In The Gifts of the Child Christ. Ed.Sadler, Glenn Edward, 23-28. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1973.

Mason, Charlotte. A Philosophy of Education. London:Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925.

Parish, E.A. Imagination as a Powerful Factor in aWell-Balanced Mind. The Parents’ Review. Vol.25, 379-390. 1914.

Bio

Sarah-Beth Gould is a Charlotte Mason educator, an English teacher, and a past homeschool mom. She currently runs classes for homeschool youth where she lives in South Africa.