Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

But, according to Suvin, there is also a more militant
and critical kind of dystopian science fiction narrative that
is based upon the epic form. Here, he writes, events are
‘presented as historically contingent and unforeseeable
(and thus as a rule historically reversible)’ (1988 80). These
‘critical dystopias’ as they have become known, project
contemporary anxieties about increasing social control into
a dystopian future, but give explanations as to how this
arose, and explore strategies of resistance. In these films a
future totalitarian government reflects in exaggerated form
the ‘bad’ politics of today, whether that of the religious
right (eg., V for Vendetta (McTeigue, 2005), Equilibrium
(Wimmer, 2002), or The Handmaid’s Tale (Schlöndorff,
1990)), or of capitalism in its Fordist (eg., THX 1138 (Lucas,
1971) and Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013)) or post-Fordist (eg.,
The Island (Bay, 2005), or In Time (Niccol, 2011)) incarnation,
or that of a slightly vaguer ‘1%’ (eg., The Hunger Games
trilogy (Ross and Lawrence, 2012-15), or Snowpiercer
(Joon-ho, 2013)). It then falls upon the film’s hero to either
organise the resistance or escape, and in doing so direct
our ‘critical’ judgement against the repressive elements
of our present that are figured in the film. As a result,
Jameson argues, the narrative structures of utopian and
dystopian texts are not simple opposites, like utopian
and anti-utopian texts arguing for or against a politics of
social co-operation, but ‘in reality have nothing to do with
each other’ (1996 55). Indeed, some commentators claim
that ‘critical dystopias’ emerged in the 1980s as a specific
response to the rise of neo-liberalism, with the negative
portrayal of corporate capitalism in Alien (Scott, 1979) and
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