Dystopian Novels

Similar feminist shifts happens in Kunstler’s trilogy, although the shifts in his novels are not so pronounced or dramatic. His book is the most subtle of these three nextopian novels. In World Made by Hand, the main character describes a town meeting and notes that “all the trustees were men, no women and no plain laborers;” the town “reverted to social division” that is unethical in today’s society (Kunstler 101). A return to clear social delineations is evidence of a slip back in time, toward segregated folly and a loss of equality between humans which places the novel firmly in the dystopian category. However, some people with very traditional or strict religious beliefs would argue that clear delineation of duties aids a society because
She is beyond child bearing years so her relationship with Robert is not one of procreation, instead it is one of physical enjoyment. The arrangement shows the freedom Jane Ann has to a healthy and fulfilling sexual life without social stigmas that exist today. This choice is not like the mandated promiscuity of other supposedly utopian novels, but it shows an increased respect for the needs of an individual woman and is therefore a feminist representation. However, lack of access to medicine (in this case for impotency) is evidence of a dystopia (13, 134, 154). Later in the series Loren is cured by an imaginative New Weird twist involving a witch and a night of hallucinations that continue to mix utopian and dystopian themes.5 After Loren is cured, Jane Ann happily ends the affair. The more juxtaposition characters display the more likely the story is a nextopian novel. The ability of a single scene, or a single character, to be identified as utopian by some and dystopian by others typifies the scene or character as nextopian; if there are numerous examples then the novel is
Indeed, the idea of population control comes straight from dystopian nightmares. Connie visits the township’s yellow birthing center, which Luciente calls a “brooder” (Piercy 100). In today’s vernacular a brooder is a place for warming baby chickens, piglets, or other young livestock. The similarities between livestock and fetus continue when Connie enters the brooder, but the cheerful yellow is replaced with a calming blue environment, and human production at this stage, resembles fish farming (101). The choice to relegate reproduction to a “crazy machine,” “a nightmare of [this] age,” may be environmentally sound and might eliminate the world problems with population overshoot, and famine (Piercy 102, 103 Bartlett). Theoretically, resource wars would diminish because the equilibrium between what the Earth can supply, and what the human population consumes, could be maintained.7 Despite the touted environmental benefits of “maintaining a steady population”, it is a dystopian element because of the removal of personal choice by denying women the right to choose motherhood, and a religious concern for those who believe population control circumvents divine mandate