At some fundamental level, every person longs to return to Eden

A Guide to Dystopian Literature

by Bradley J. Birzer

Preface

For almost as long as I have had the privilege of reading, I have read dystopian literature. I started with Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, but I soon rather quickly devouredBrave New World,Animal Farm, andNineteen Eighty-Four as well as many of the works of Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. Insatiably hungry for such stories, I continued with Ira Levin’s rather tame This Perfect Day and the rather effete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. From there, I read the post-apocalyptic stories of Nevil Shute, Stephen King, Jerry Pournelle, Wesley Streiber, and Gordon Dickson, as well as the dark graphic novels of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. I came to Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, C.S. Lewis, Vernor Vinge, and Walter Miller while in college and graduate school. Throughout this literary exploration, I also devoured science fiction on screen—everything from the original Star Trek and The Prisoner toPlanet of the Apes, from Blade Runner to Dark City and Batman Begins.

Having been born in 1967 into an intensely Goldwater household and coming of age in the 1980s near a number of Titan II missile silos, I was very much a child of the Cold War, adamantly pro-liberty and just as adamantly anti-Soviet. What I read in the science-fiction horrors and dystopian nightmares had already played out in places such as Nazi Germany and Austria, and was playing out as I read in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. Relatively secure under the immense skies of the Great Plains of Kansas, I knew that half of the world lived in some form of a toxically-ideological regime, dehumanizing anti-paradises that promoted fear, hatred, and insanity. The music I listened to—by Kansas, Rush, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Pink Floyd—only heightened my existential anxiety about the world and its countless inhumanities.

The founder of post-World War II conservatism and extraordinary novelist and fiction writer, Russell Amos Kirk, wrote poignantly:

To most observers, T.S. Eliot among them, it has seemed far more probable that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless, a totalist political domination in which the life of the spirit and the inquiring intellect will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rather than Huxley’s Brave New World of cloying sensuality.1

Kirk suggests in the essay that we might very well be heading into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tolkien’s Mordor rather than Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s Brave New World. Regardless, he fears we might very well abolish what he refers to sarcastically as “the superstitions of the childhood of the race.”

The purpose of this Imaginative Conservative Guide to Dystopian Literature (of which this essay is the first part) is to think about the most successful and important of the dystopias of which writers have conceived over the past century or so. In doing so, I offer a rather unapologetically Kirkian analysis of the literature, taking it seriously as deep in thought and imaginative in manifestation. As Kirk did in so many things, I look first to the meanings of terms as well as to the context in which they arose. After a longish discussion of ideology, I turn to the great authors themselves, in chronological order: Robert H. Benson; Aldous Huxley; C.S. Lewis; George Orwell; Ray Bradbury; Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and Margaret Atwood. The gold standard of dystopia belongs to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I have given it the most space for analysis of all the works discussed. The guide, then, concludes with a relatively brief examination of authors such as Michael O’Brien, Philip K. Dick, J. Neil Schulman, Ira Levin, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Return to Eden

At some fundamental level, every person longs to return to Eden. This is not just due to the happiness we desire that Eden would have certainly provided–which, of course, would have been wonderful. There is much more we crave at the very depths of our souls. It is the order and the surety that Eden offered that we want and desire at our deepest levels. In Eden, everything and every person has its and his place. As with all things in the created order, we would have had and known our place had Eden survived. We would comprehend fully our relationship to God, to the animals, to the plants, to the very earth itself, and, perhaps most compellingly, to one another and to our very selves. It is worth restating: Every human desires to know his place; to know his past; to know his present and to know his future. Whether this desire springs from physiology and genetics, psychology and the intricacies of the mind, or from the deepest imaginings of the soul, we only know that we want Eden, and the surety, the peace, and the happiness it promised.

For most in the Judeo-Christian West over the last two thousand years, Eden has remained rooted—firmly or symbolically—in a past eloquently described in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis. Its time has come and gone, but its story remains embedded in our cultural life as one of human tragedy and divine outrage. It exists, if at all, only as a memory of the species. Even then, however one takes the story—as wrapped in symbolism, in factual reality, or in some combination of the two—Eden at its absolute best is served merely as a poor shadow, even when it lived in something more than memory. Always, it was a mere foreshadowing of a transcendent and heavenly New Jerusalem, ruled fully by the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings.

An essential caveat remains, however. Though orthodox Christian believers claim that a real Eden will come only at the end of times through the Grace and Will of the Blessed Trinity, though even Jesus does not know the hour or the day, heterodox and heretical Christians have promoted the idea that one could build the Kingdom of God here and now, in this time and in this place. Or, maybe, if they are a bit more conservative in temperament, they have claimed they will build it tomorrow and next door. They have pulled the building of the Kingdom—a perfected Eden—into this world. An important strain of non-Judeo-Christian thought in the West has also believed in the possibility of Eden in this world as well. There is no small amount of irony in this, as the same people who have advocated such an idea have often seen the biblical story of “Eden” as simply a story with no basis in historical reality. Yet these same persons have willingly believed that such a society could be created in a historical moment. In the frontispiece to his 1967 work, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, Hungarian scholar Thomas Molnar wrote:

From time to time the belief spreads among men that it is possible to construct an ideal society. Then the call is sounded for all to gather and build it—the city of God on earth. Despite its attractiveness, this is a delirious ideal stamped with the madness of logic. The truth is that society is always unfinished, always in motion, and its key problems can never be solved by social engineering. Yet, man must conquer, again and again, the freedom to see this truth. In the intervals he succumbs to the dream of a mankind frozen and final in its planetary pride.2

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