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@noah-cochran

First, I just realized I have no idea what the Dystopian spread of genres has looked like over the past decade. I grew out of the YA-focused part of the genre a couple years after the Hunger Games series ended.

Looking through Amazon tells me it probably hasn’t changed terribly much, though.

So, what I’m wanting is fresh plot ideas–in particular for the villains/antagonists’ plans.

Dystopian fiction mostly needs a villain if you’re in strictly YA territory. Both middle grade and adult Dystopian have historically been pretty villain-free—at least, the antagonist falls into “man vs nature” and “man vs God” more than “man vs man.”

The totalitarian governments usually exist as a systemic force, not a villain with a logical agenda which can be overthrown with enough passion.

Outside of YA, the core of Dystopian is, “The world is brutal and dehumanizing. Knowing this, how shall we then live?”

People live in brutal, dehumanizing systems every day in cultures around the world. The factory job I used to work felt like a watered-down dystopian nightmare. Plenty of different jobs create the same effect.

You might also feel the same way in regard to COVID mandates or to government regulation concerning what your children may or may not do or be taught in school.

Whether any of these specific feelings are reasonable is irrelevant.

Dystopian tells a reader who has these feelings, “You’re not alone.”

Dystopian can also warn against a slippery slope of social and political injustice, saying, “If things keep going the way they do, look what might happen!” but they’re still speaking to the reader’s anxiety and frustration at the world around them.

Historically, one of the core elements of Dystopian has been romantic human connection. It symbolizes an intimate, very internal human bond which an oppressive system cannot control. This obviously makes it easy fodder for YA, but it’s the reason so many of the classic Dystopian books for adults have explicit scenes between romantic partners.

If you’re trying to find interesting ideas, I suggest you not fixate on a government specifically as your dehumanizing system. You *can* use that, but you might find new ideas by moving away from it.

Unless you’re deliberately writing for a teenage audience who needs to look at a humanized villain so they can direct their righteous anger at them, I also suggest you avoid a single villain who has a logical agenda for creating a Dystopian society.

In America’s Liberal Illiberalism, Michael C. Desch says, “Good things do not always go together.” A noble and democratic beginning to a nation or socio-political system does not incentivize it to further develop in that direction, and vice versa.

A political system can do amazing, benevolent good for its citizens while brutally dealing with its geographic neighbors. A people group which survives attempted genocide can turn around and do the same to another group.

Like people, systems are neither all good nor all evil, nor must they continue in goodness if they arise through noble causes, nor does allying with evil at one time force them to be cartoonishly villainous themselves in the future.

The classic, overused example is Hitler and Nazi Germany. Had Hitler died as an infant, someone else likely would have filled his role, because the circumstances leading to Nazi Germany were incredibly complex and due in large part to the perhaps evil, perhaps unwise actions of men who, in many cases, had good and noble intentions.

Some of my favorite Dystopian stories:

• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin. (PG-13 sexual content)

  An anarcho-communist society was exiled to the moon of their home planet years ago.

  We follow a scientist as he struggles to find a sense of identity and meaning in a society where it’s seen as immature and selfish to claim ownership over your work or over another human being in the context of having a family.

• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. (she is *phenomenal* in this genre!) (PG-13 sexual content)

  In the near future, we have far too few resources due to overpopulation and climate change.

  People live in cramped, crowded conditions, only the very rich can afford to vacation in nature, and everyone is given free recreational drugs to deal with the misery of being alive. Our main character suffers what he considers a curse: His dreams manifest as reality, and they always seem to make the world worse.

  He struggles with what it means to be human and to have interpersonal relationships in a world where nothing seems real and his subconscious could rip happiness away in the blink of an eye.

• The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.

  The Earth has been ravaged, and humanity now lives within The Machine, a fully automated system which allows people to live in a little room and have all their physical needs met.

  In the first scene, we basically have a character video chat with her son and then make a vlog and watch some YouTube videos. The story says, “If we allow automation to replace our every need, can we retain what it means to be human? At what point does the Machine replace humanity, and what happens when the Machine stops?” The story’s prescience regarding shut-in internet addicts is astounding considering it was written in 1909.

There are a few more I want to mention, but they’re R-rated enough that I won’t recommend them here.

In a nutshell, my advice is, “Create a dehumanizing system and then ask, ‘How do we remain human inside it?’”

Don’t fixate on villains and tyrannical governments in particular.