When an author sits down to write a dystopian novel, dystopian anxiety is a clear central focus. The most common way for this to manifest is a post-apocalyptic risk of humanity’s extinction at each step of the storyline. Under the guise of this genre of literature, the deepest anxieties that people have about the contemporary world and society can be freely explored hypothetically. Further, even if these hypotheticals make a reader anxious, they will still want to read it because humans continue to subconsciously search and yearn for an answer to their questions. Through dystopian texts, humans can question the modern world and theorize about what might happen in the future if events such as climate change continue at their current rate.
This issue introduces the way humans think about two main topics: anxiety and how to define it, as well as how to “properly” digest dystopian texts. Clinically, many health care providers and psychologists such as Jessye Cohen-Filipic, Ph.D. think that modern society utilizes the word anxiety in too broad of a sense, and yet the clinical threshold for anxiety is increasingly pervasive. In recent years, a rising number of individuals have met this threshold, which is often attributed to transitioning back into “normalcy” after COVID-19. However, although fear and anxiety are similarly explored in dystopian texts, they have one key difference found in the very fact that fear is present-based and often seen as irrational, whereas anxiety is future-based.
For example, teenagers and young adults will cite a plethora of anxieties: grades, finances, nutrition, sticking to a routine, peer pressure, and more. However, those are things still to come. In the present one can be afraid of a test, and anxious for the grade to come, and there is a clear difference. As a young adult myself, several stressors make me anxious and I definitely fall into the category of someone who has enjoyed reading dystopian novels for many years. I enjoy contemplating what the “end of times” might look like and reading a plethora of perspectives on this. Although I am an anxious person who overthinks, I use reading to calm me down and lose myself in the fantasy of the world I am reading about even if the text is about jarring, suspenseful, or potentially anxiety-inducing topics.
In dystopian novels, anxieties about what could be are the focal point, with fear taking a backseat or adding another layer to the anxieties described in the novel. Often these texts are set in a world after which some major cataclysmic event has occurred, thereby addressing, critiquing, or even satirizing a major anxiety in the modern world. Authors create with words and use their works to pressure readers to consider the serious implications that could occur if issues such as technological advancements involving AI are not addressed.
While some readers find the worldbuilding involved in high fantasy fiction tedious, dystopian texts offer a more digestible alternative in which the setting is most often simply a modified version of present-day Earth as humanity knows it now. Common modifications often include a widespread virus, nuclear fallout, or horrific natural disasters. This can be daunting for some readers who can no longer recognize the Earth they are accustomed to, further increasing their anxiety, and yet most readers in this category still refuse to put down the books that make them anxious until they have finished reading them. This directly correlates to an inherent human need to know the answer, in this case, to know what happens in a storyline imagined and created by a certain author. Modern dystopia is such a robust and varied genre with room for future growth. Anxiety is the center of this in the different ways it is manifested, explored, and grows within the readers who cannot wait to see what happens next.
Meghan is a first-year student in the exploratory pathways program who won’t let anxiety get in the way of her reading. They can be reached at [email protected]