I Call It A Dystopia, But That’s Not The Whole Story
One of the first questions people ask me about my upcoming novel, MY NAME IS GRACE000, is the genre. Of course, I start with “science fiction,” maybe adding “futuristic” to help narrow it down. After that, I usually call it “dystopian.”
If this conversation sounds familiar, I may have even said it to your face that my upcoming book is a dystopia. Or maybe, after visiting my website, you’re thinking, “Isn’t ‘dystopian sci-fi’ in the heading on your homepage, for Pete’s sake?!”
This is why I’m writing today’s blog post. If “dystopian fiction” was far as we got, I’m sorry to say that I was not being entirely accurate. To do so, I’m afraid, requires greater detail. Let me explain:
So, WTF Is Your Book’s Genre?
The real answer is that my SkyWorld stories represent a subgenre of sci-fi called “speculative fiction.” This term is pretty literal: fiction that speculates on the future of our modern world if carried through to a logical extreme. Sometimes, this might involve an outside disruption of something unknown, like the Martian invasion in H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). In a case like SkyWorld, the future springs from aspects of modern life we already know.
But despite how I might describe it in our first few minutes of conversation, that future is not quite dystopian. Not entirely. The real answer is that my SkyWorld books represent “ambitopian speculative fiction,” but that’s a mouthful. Positioning it that way too soon risks losing reader interest — your interest — right off the bat.
If I still have it, and you’re curious to narrow in on what exactly is my genre of fiction, then read on.
The Spark Behind the nuance
Shortly after my cousin started reading my first novel, I AM TAMRA (also set in SkyWorld), I went searching for a new genre to describe it. Readers have said the story picks up after the sixth chapter, so I wasn’t expecting early feedback, but a few chapters in, they already has some: “It seems so cool to live in SkyCity.
I was surprised. I didn’t intend for people to be drawn to the advantages. Then again, I get it. The tech, the ease, the shopping; my goal was to describe life for those who perform well in society as one full of pleasure and abundance. On the surface, who wouldn’t want to live in a world like that?
But by the end of the book, my cousin’s perspective had shifted. By their final pages, the main characters reveal the truth, why they’re both named Tamra and both outcasts. Only then can we see skysociety as dystopian or “worse than our own.” And it’s actually much, much worse than we expected.
So, Is It ‘Dystopian’?
At this point, you’ve probably heard the word “dystopia.” From THE HUNGER GAMES hitting the big screen to Apple TV’s “Silo” bringing Hugh Howey’s WOOL series to life, and the general cultural impact of THE HANDMAID’S TALE, the book-to-TV pipeline has brought dystopian fiction into the spotlight. Everyone knows at least one dystopia and can usually see the themes paralleled in modern society.
In 1516, Thomas More established the conceptual contrast in his book, UTOPIA, which criticized the socio-economic and political issues of the times. When Orson Welles’ adapted THE WAR OF THE WORLDS for radio in 1938, it’s broadcast resulted in national panic over humanity’s safety from a Martian invasion. Then, in 1948, George Orwell defined modern fears around Big Brother and the surveillance state in my all-time favorite, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, a legacy that still echoes today. These authors proved the tangible impact a dystopian message could have and paved the way for future dystopian authors.
But THE HUNGER GAMES in 2008 brought the genre mass-market success. After the dystopian series sold over 1 million copies worldwide, publishers rushed to find new stories to capture the same audience — DIVERGENT, THE MAZE RUNNER, (Add your favorite in a comment below!).
This is why I introduce readers to SkyWorld as dystopian fiction. Most understand what it implies — an imagined society living under times of overt oppression, dehumanization, and suffering. Dystopias explore systems, power, and human behavior, but at their core, they are a warning. In that sense, I feel confident describing SkyWorld is a dystopia, where authoritarianism, surveillance, technological overreach, lead to societal collapse, at least in the way we know it.
But what if that oppression and dehumanization didn’t feel like suffering. At least, not on the surface.
Ambitopia: A World of Both extremes
Finally, let’s unpack “ambitopia.” In all honesty, I had never heard the term until recently. I had always called my SkyWorld concept a dystopia until I learned the term “speculative fiction,” I thought, “This gets me a little closer.” And for most readers (and agents), "speculative sci-fi will likely be enough.
But “ambitopia” felt like the shoe that finally fit.
According to Redfern Jon Barrett (no relation), who coined the term, an “ambitopia” explores cohesive and believable “societies of extremes rooted in ambiguity, much like our own … that cannot be categorised [sic] as either good or bad … both distinctly better and worse.”
In SkyWorld, the power structures that nearly collapsed human society were also the only ones who could step in to save it. As resources grew scarce, they increasingly relied on technology to serve more of our everyday needs, freeing us from more and greater responsibility. Dehumanization was merely a side effect of that decision.
Let’s just say the road to SkyWorld was paved with good intentions, with “good” being defined by those with enough power to pave it.
Minds, unchanged, always Rebuild the same Evils
So, what is the speculative warning of MY NAME IS GRACE000? It’s the same warning in all my SkyWorld stories. For part of the answer, look n further than the start of my first novel, I AM TAMRA, which quotes Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth:
“If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, and the same dysfunction.”
SkyWorld is this recreation: a handful of men with power over what remains of the world that allowed them to take it, destroying and rebuilding as needed to ensure the systems empowering them stay in place. The more we normalize their ability to manipulate our economic status, health, environment — and most importantly, our minds — the more we risk conditioning future generations to accept such corruption as normal.
Once we step into that future, only outsiders looking in will be able to see the depravity in what we’ve come to view as acceptable. This makes outsiders a threat to skysociety.
This is SkyWorld.
