Dystopian Literature Reviews Samples For Students

Setting the Stage: The Themes in Chapters 1-3

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a hybrid between a manifesto of ideas, brought forth by characters with only a patina of depth, and a story with the depth closer to a graphic novel than that of a traditional tome. The opening three chapters bring the majority of the significant themes or ideas at work in the book. The director explains how this particular Utopia provides people bred to order, using artificial fertilization to grow babies inside bottles. Ultimately, they are not born but instead are decanted. Each new person is assigned to one of five social castes, from the Alphas, who have the most ...

The interaction between science and fiction in our day and age is for everybody to see and experience. The subject is a vast one and often kept separate from formal discussions its effects on the society and how it is affected by it. A science fiction topic which gained massive popularity in the decade of the 80’s and continued through to the 90’s was the subject of virtual reality. Virtual Reality simply refers to environments generated by a means of a computer program where physical presence is simulated. Such environments can be imaginary but very often bear close resemblance to ...

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008) bear striking resemblances to each other. Both novels are set in an apocalyptic dystopian future; both novels use modern advances in the media as a central part of their plot; and both could be argued, in a way, to address the issues of male/female relationships. They are linked too by critical confusion over their genre. Are they both science fiction novels? Are they fantasies? Are they informed predictions of the fate of humanity? Atwood has always been adamant that her earlier novel The Handmaid’s Tale was ...

A Critical Paper

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood was first published in 2003; the novel is a dystopian vision of world in the not-too-distant future in which humanity has been almost destroyed through a combination of careless and self-centred scientific practices and moral corruption. Like most dystopian fiction (indeed, like Atwood’s own The Handmaid’s Tale), the novel works less as a neat prediction of the future, but an urgent warning about our contemporary society and controversial issues within it. Ultimately, then the novel is less a futuristic nightmare than a satire on current developments in bio-science and in the world of technology, as well ...