Dystopi

MEET YOUR TEACHERS DAYA LEVEL

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Dystopi

Questions on Dystopian Fiction – all the answers are in the video!

1. What does the video cite as one of the earliest dystopian

stories?

2. What do dystopian stories do with trends in contemporary

society?

3. What was H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine about?

4. What was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We about?

5. What three things did Orwell’s 1984 critique about society?

6. In which three genres other than novels might you find

dystopian stories?

7. What do Dr Strangelove and Watchmen warn us about?

8. What do V for Vendetta and The Handmaid’s Tale warn us

about?

9. Name one issue that today’s modern dystopian fiction covers.

10. What does the video seem to conclude about whether it’s

possible to create a perfect world?

‘The Fifth Season” is a dystopian fantasy novel written by N.K. Jemisin, published in 2015.

Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket – except his face, because he is afraid of the dark – and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She’s old hat at this by now.

What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.

And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost-question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:

He wasn’t. Not really. But now he will be.

* * *

But you need context. Let’s try the ending again, writ continentally.

Here is a land.

It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness. It is a land of quiet and bitter irony.

The Stillness has had other names. It was once several other lands. It’s one vast, unbroken continent at present, but at some point in the future it will be more than one again.

Very soon now, actually.

The end begins in a city: the oldest, largest and most magnificent living city in the world. The city is called Yumenes, and once it was the heart of an empire. It is still the heart of many things, though the empire has wilted somewhat in the years since its first bloom, as empires do.

Yumenes is not unique because of its size. There are many large cities in this part of the world, chain-linked along the equator like a continental girdle. Elsewhere in the world villages rarely grow into towns, and towns rarely become cities, because all such polities are hard to keep alive when the earth keeps trying to eat them…but Yumenes has been stable for most of its twenty-seven centuries.

Yumenes is unique because here alone have human beings dared to build not for safety, not for comfort, not even for beauty, but for bravery. The city’s walls are a masterwork of delicate mosaics and embossing detailing its people’s long and brutal history. The clumping masses of its buildings are punctuated by great high towers like fingers of stone, hand-wrought lanterns powered by the modern marvel of hydroelectricity, delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity, and architectural structures called balconies that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish, that no one has ever built them before in written history. (But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.) The streets are paved not with easy-to-replace cobbles, but with a smooth, unbroken and miraculous substance the locals have dubbed asphalt. Even the shanties of Yumenes are daring, because they’re just thin-walled shacks that would blow over in a bad windstorm, let alone a shake. Yet they stand, as they have stood, for generations.

At the core of the city are many tall buildings, so it is perhaps unsurprising that one of them is larger and more daring than all the rest combined: a massive structure whose base is a star pyramid of precision-carved obsidian brick. Pyramids are the most stable architectural form, and this one is pyramids times five because why not? And because this is Yumenes, a vast geodesic sphere whose faceted walls resemble translucent amber sits at the pyramid’s apex, seeming to balance there lightly – though in truth, every part of the structure is channelled toward the sole purpose of supporting it. It looks precarious; that is all that matters.

“When we say ‘the world has ended’ it’s usually a lie,

because the planet is just fine.” them.”

“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?”

“For all those who have to fight for the

respect that everyone else is

given without

“There is always an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is

always important to include the eyes;

otherwise people will

“There are none so frightened, or so strange

in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure

phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims

will someday do back what was done to them.”

“Some worlds are built on a faultline of pain,

held up by nightmares.”

What makes it obvious to you that this extract is from a dystopian novel?

“There are none so frightened, or so strange

in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure

phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims

will someday do back what was done to them.”

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985.

Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning. I didn't hear the bells. Perhaps I've become used to them.

We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them.

What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways.

It's the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stuffed with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It's the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there's no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros.

Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like gray shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting.

But on one bag there's blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child's idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all.

The men wear white coats, like those worn by doctors or scientists. Doctors and scientists aren't the only ones, there are others, but they must have had a run on them this morning. Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human fetus. They were doctors, then, in the time before, when such things were legal.

“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one

composes a speech.”

“Nolite te bastardes

carborundorum. Don't let the

bastards grind you down.”

“Better never means better for

everyone... It always means

worse, for some.”

What makes it obvious to you that this extract is from a dystopian novel?

“When we think of the past it's the

beautiful things we pick out. We want

to believe it was all like that.”

“A rat in a maze is free to go

anywhere, as long as it stays inside

the maze.”

“I want everything back, the way it

was. But there is no point to it, this

wanting.”

Construct Your Own Dystopia (planning notes)Possible opening lines, some taken from “Dystopian YA Novel” – a parody Twitter

account, some taken from actual novels

"Quiet," Mother hisses. "It's the Elder's Speech." The futuristic hologram projector lights up by the basin where we still wash our clothes.

We all stand in line for The Test. Everyone else looks so confident. Am I the only one terrified?

I scoff. "The Old Prophecy isn't real. It's just a legend. A bedtime story." Baelem smiles. "That's what they want you to think."

Maybe we can escape the Colony, farther than the Otherlands. I've heard whispers of a place far north, beyond the System....

He saw the first tree shudder and fall, far of in the distance. The he heard his mother call out the kitchen window: “Luke! Inside. Now.”

My mother used to tell me about the ocean. She said there was a place where there was nothing but water as far as you could see and that it was always

moving, rushing toward you and then away.

It's been sixty-four years since the President and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure.

What would happen if…

One month ago, all the banks failed and money became worthless

Only girls are allowed to go to university

When people reach the age of 60, they are killed.

At birth, all children are fitted with GPS microchips to protect them

Twenty years ago, all international travel was banned

One week ago, petrol ran out

A year ago, all electrical appliances turned against us

What happens in these ministries? What do they control?

The Ministry of Vice and Virtue

The Ministry for Fairytale Endings

The Ministry of Plenty

The Ministry for Human Resources

The Ministry for Collateral Damage

The Ministry for Enhanced Interrogation

The Ministry for Aspiration

The Ministry for Correctness

The Ministry for Public Enlightenment

The Ministry for Limitation

The Ministry for Public Safety

Unusual Names

Lya

Bram

Magnus

Cora

Bastiaan

Holden

Alberta

Albin

Newt

Vesta

Sim

Write your opening paragraph:

A level English Language and LiteratureThe A Level course is a two-year course. 80% of the assessment is examined at the end of Year 2, and the other 20% is a Non-Exam Assessment (i.e. coursework) that you will begin towards the end of the first year.

In the first year, you will study:

An anthology of non-fiction texts on Paris.

An anthology of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy.

A play, A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams.

In the second year, you will study:

An anthology of non-fiction texts on Paris.

A novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

A biography, Into The Wild, by John Krakauer.

The Paris and Duffy anthologies will be provided by us, but you will need to buy your own copies of the other texts. Please buy these editions:

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, published by Penguin Modern Classics: ISBN 9780141190273

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, published by Vintage: ISBN 9780099740919

Into The Wild by John Krakauer, published by Pan: ISBN 9780330351690

Support your local bookshop! If you are local, we recommend Ebb & Flo Books in Chorley – it’s good to support small local businesses instead of the dystopian Amazon

giant, especially at the moment.

To place an order, contact the bookshop directly at info@ebbandflobookshop.co.uk, ring 01257 262773 or call in at 12 Gillibrand St, Chorley PR7 2EJ. Say you are a

Runshaw student when you order!