Dystopian Fiction & Middle School Health Class
In middle school, Ms. Schoen told us if we masturbated, our liver would explode. She didn’t tell us this directly, but rather through a story, where the liver explosion happened “to a man she knew.”
Other lessons in Health/Phys. Ed were instructed similarly. Classroom classics like Supersize Me were shown with attached worksheets. Video lessons were good bets for teachers. Grotesque imagery drew delighted squeals from the students; kids who smoked a single cigarette would immediately go through a series of corny misfortunes, and by the film’s end become an irredeemable meth head. They were funny .^
Every Thursday, 3rd period, Health teachers around America employed the age-old storyteller technique to caution against danger.
“Show, don’t tell.”
Funny things are memorable, as these lessons were supposed to be. Maybe a lot of the videos actually worked on me. I always put my seatbelt on. I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I eat kale once a week.
But some videos just could not hold a candle to the vices they were advocating against. I watched porn as a kid. Lots of porn. None of the sex ed. videos ever came close to any porn. Porn is fun! Tons of dopamine. As much as horrific post-sex imagery preached by school teachers amused us, it just could not compete with the opposite thing.
As storytellers, sex ed. teachers have failed.
Dystopian fiction are sex ed. PSAs. Dystopian fiction are anti-smoking documentaries.
I don’t like dystopian fiction. They make me bored, and want to vomit.
The *1984*s are supposed to be teachable. They are dramas meant to teach us something. They are textbooks, and textbooks aren’t great fiction. In fact, I enjoy a real textbook much more than 1984. History textbooks have thousands of characters. 1984 had Winston and some memory hole.
I watched all of Star Trek TNG this year. Then I watched Star Trek: Picard.
TNG is pretty great. Picard is an average TV show.
Classic Star Trek was about optimism, reason, and positivity. It was a world without poverty, because money no longer existed. Without the mechanism of credit currency, and with the help of “replicators” (machines which created matters out of nothing, as common in the household as the microwave), the chase for wealth disappeared.
Within the Federation, there were no wars. Most diseases facing almost all creatures were curable. Conflicts were resolved with logic, reason, and cool-headed discussions. The smartest and most well-adjusted kids enrolled into the Academy, then joined Starfleet, where they explored the galaxy, made connections, conducted cutting-edge research, and protected every citizen. Whenever Starfleet encounters a new species, they attempt communication, then extend a message of friendship. Many antagonists in the show weren’t villains, they were just antagonistic: political bureaucrats made to see their errors, hot-headed leaders cooled through negotiations, exorbitant creatures calmed by science magic.
The show of Star Trek was filled with adventures and philosophical ponderance, with wit and tranquil slices of life. The world of Star Trek was wonderful. It is a world I want to live in.
New Star Trek tries to offer teachable moments on present day. There are now poverty, drug addiction, and incurable diseases in the future. Characters then time-traveled to 21st century Earth, giving excuse to display border tensions, police brutality, racial injustice, homelessness, climate demise, and bad-faith corporate control. These were the impetus of drama, of action sequences where police cars may chase non-police cars. In the concurrent show, Star Trek: Discovery, the main characters fire phasers at hundreds of space ships, and thousands of fighters fly around to shoot at millions of nanite space enemies. Mysterious entities sprout all across the galaxy, prophesied to enact doom to all civilizations. It is a world of nightmare.
Let us pose a choice:
- Being told how to avoid a bad Thing from happening.
- Being told how to obtain a good Thing.
Many would choose 1, many would choose 2. I try to choose 2 as often as I can.
it’s the feeling I get when looking for the absolute most perfect hoodie to buy vs. when watching a very important video on driving safety.
Drama in dystopian fiction feels boring, because drama is about one set of characters trying to gain an advantage, yet gaining advantage is fundamentally futile in an eternally disadvantaged world. Hopelessness can only be vicariously experienced so many times before exhaustion settles in.
There are nice things in Dystopia. Essentially these boil down to:
Why survive in a zombie apocalypse?
Why do characters even try to survive in a zombie apocalypse? Because there is the possibility of a cure. Because other humans still exist, and the MC wants to fall in love, wants to have friends, wants to have sex, wants to have a hearty dinner in a warm, bright, wooded compound, safe from infection. There are still books in the world which the MC has not read. In this sense, the zombie swarms are just a really big inconvenience to achieving the good things in life. These nice things make drama not futile.
However, dystopian fiction is far more easily bogged down by social commentary than non-dystopian alternatives. All bad things in our reality become exaggerated bad things in a typical dystopia, to add to its dystopia-ness, with the consequences of an apocalypse being the bonus-bad thing.
This increased exposure to commentary made me stop reading dystopia.
The solution to Dystopian Fiction, however, is not Utopian Fiction. Dystopian Fiction is Option 1. Utopian Fiction is not Option 2. Rather than fiction about Utopia, I think fiction set in Utopia would solve this boredom problem. A non-hopeless world is intrinsically more intriguing, because opportunity for positive change looms at every corner. Furthermore, because characters have subjectively good things, the risk of losing any due to negative change carries weight and meaning.
Like a middle school Health class, and with the same exaggerated swagger, dystopian fiction shows us the consequences of walking a dark path.
“Show vs. Tell.”
Don’t waste the “show” on things we already know. Let Reuters tell us the familiar miseries of our reality, let novels show us the unfamiliar imaginations of infinite worlds.