‘ To take dystopian literature literally is to completely miss the point’

I never thought I’d be sick of talking about The Handmaid’s Tale. And 1984. And Brave New World. Yet, here I am. Not because they aren’t amazing works of fiction. But because a sort of intellectual cottage industry has sprung up attempting to figure out just how these imagined dystopias fit into our present idea of reality.

To take dystopian fiction literally, to weigh its reality, is to miss the point; it’s to lose the nuance of the imagining, the act of wonder and reflection.

Since the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale streamed, there has been a constant stream of stories about how women in Texas are living this fictionalized universe right now. They aren’t, though there are parallels. Think pieces have sprung up suggesting the whole series is being misread because it simply hasn’t happened, or because it’s not grounded in historical or present fact or lived experience. These are bizarre interpretations that dismiss the forced-breeding program that was the Atlantic slave trade and forgets that women couldn’t hold credit cards without a male co-signer.

But I digress. These comparisons force me to indulge in the very sin that’s making my eyes roll every time I open my Twitter feed. Dystopian novels are, in essence, adult fairy tales. They warn us about what happens when we allow totalitarians to take power or let science and consumerism or the pursuit of happiness deflate our humanity, or the perilousness of female autonomy. The best that the genre has offered this century has been able to hold up a Black Mirror (to borrow a phrase) to our technology and social-media obsessed lives. The ones from the 20th century – with which we are currently obsessed – hold slivers of truth about how we now live precisely because they weren’t confined to the conditions of the time in which they were written.

Just as fables maintain lessons for children centuries after they are set, these fictions are able to remain relevant because they don’t anchor themselves to the reality of a fleeting moment.

Dystopian novels are sophisticated warnings about not taking candy from strangers or following a wolf into the woods. They have a point, and they have meaning, and each is a reflection of the time it was written, the era that preceded it and, yes, sometimes, a warning sign of what’s to come. But novelists are neither reporters nor prophets. And as such, their art need not be debased by ham-fisted attempts to fit fiction into reality.