For fun, I’ve been trying to compile a list of Dystopian Sci-Fi settings—a la 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.—and I’ve run into a stumbling block. I’m having a hard time thinking of any works centered around, or at least heavily featuring, fictional Dystopian states or empires in regions of the world like Latin America, Asia (outside of Japan) in general and the Indian subcontinent in particular, or Australasia/Oceania. (Not counting Orwell’s “Oceania”)
I’m seeing a lot of examples where they’re reduced to lowly swaths of conquered satellite territories, or reduced to various forms of wasteland by one apocalypse or another.
But I’ve only been looking for a couple of evenings, and I’m almost a stranger to the subgenre, so I’m sure there are at least SOME that I’ve missed…can anyone point me towards a few? The fiendish Cyberpunk Corporate Republic of Macondo, maybe? Dehumanizing mega-communist police states in New Zealand? Handicapper Generals of the Arabian Penninsula?
I have no idea—but I’d love to find out about any, if anyone could illuminate me.
Nevil Shute’s On The Beach is a famous one that comes to mind immediately - set in Australia, after the N Hemisphere has been obliterated by nuclear war. But I guess that’s post-apocalyptic rather than dystopian, maybe it doesn’t really fit the bill, the society is basically the same as ours, just waiting for the end of the world.
Mick Farren’s The Song of Phaid the Gambler (Phaid the Gambler & Citizen Phaid) is set so far in the future, it’s unclear where exactly on the planet anything is set.
Depending on what you consider a distopia, there is The Windup Girl and River of Gods / Cyberbad Days. All excellent books written before the time they would be blasted apart as “cultural appropriation” in this dystopian setting.
I think District 9 counts. It certainly feels like dystopian sci-fi, although admittedly in more of a “the actual world we live in is kind of dystopian” sort of way. The allegory to real life government and societal behavior in South Africa and elsewhere is not exactly subtle.
George Alec Effinger has a series set in the Middle East, in which the West has balkanized. It starts with When Gravity Fails. Pretty good.
More cyberpunk than dystopian per se, but it’s not a world I’d like to live in.
There’s also Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Marjorie Barnard Eldershaw, which is set in a future Australia where the social democratic dream has gone very pear-shaped. Very ploddy by modern standards, worthy but hard work. The original was published in a heavily censor-edited form in 1947, but finally released as written in the 1980s. Sadly the bits that had been cut out were not filled with steamy, grunting future sex, which would have helped a lot.
David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series probably counts. It’s a global dystopia, but in a world controlled by China.
I’ve only read the first two prequel novels and the first in the actual series and have enjoyed them. Apparently it goes rather off the boil after the umpteenth book, but such is the way with these things…
In the original Buck Rogers stories, Asians (Han in the novella, Mongols in the comic strip) had conquered North America. The writers eventually decided that it was not really a dystopia, but that retcon came several years later.
I tried to read them based on a glowing recommendation from a friend, but couldn’t make it through half of the first book the racism and misogyny was so heavy.
I think a lot of it is that dystopian sci-fi sort of revolves around the idea of a technological society gone wrong somehow. So I think it’s probably easier (lazier?) writing to take an existing technological nation in the West and extrapolate its future as a dystopia through some sort of technological machinations than it is to extrapolate how a developing nation might become a dystopia.
Perhaps. That doesn’t sound right to me though. I would think it’s 95% about where the creators of the novel or film or series are based or where they can get funding. Also, developing countries unless you get down to the failed state level aren’t fundamentally different in organization from more developed countries in my view. They have a lot of the same constructs but the institutions are typically weaker and less trustworthy, less insulated from political maneuvering, less able to address issues in the country, etc. Although I feel some of the more developed nations are heading down that path too. In some respects, a developing nation is closer to the failed or dystopian state portrayed in this sort of sci-fi and if they had more robust film industries that could support this sort of project we might see a lot more released.
That was my first thought. I’m not sure if Mad Max and its sequels count as sci-fi, but they’re definitely dystopian. I don’t know if they specifically mention a location in the first two movies, although there are some hints that it’s Australia IIRC (which, of course, is where they were filmed). But Beyond the Thunderdome pretty much confirms they’re in Australia, when they find the wreck of a Qantas jet and, at the end of the movie, the ruins of Sydney.
ETA: I suppose you could say the fact that Max drives an Australian Ford Falcon confirms the setting as Australia, too.
Not sure if it is exactly what you’re looking for but Vernor Vinge’s brilliant novel “The Peace War” is one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time. In the story, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory develop an advanced technology which they use to dampen a nuclear exchange and install themselves as a Peace Authority. In order to retain their superiority they make technological progress practically illegal and governments are weakened to become almost non-entities. The US has been split up and much of the land has become known as New Mexico, which is where the novel is mostly set (it’s in the year 2048).
The follow up novel (Marooned in Realtime) further explores the Technological Singularity (it’s touched on in the Peace War but not explored) - and in fact it was Vinge himself who popularised the concept and the phrase in an essay for NASA in 1993. He wrote these two novels in the 1980’s so arguably these novels were where the concept was first introduced.
Evetually the second novel is just set ‘on Earth’. I don’t think the characters quite know where they are.
The actual novels are set all over the place, but the actual dystopian society in the alternate-history Domination of the Draka series originates in South Africa.
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