Seven-and-a-half Dystopias.

A year or so back, when the Mortal Engines movie was looming, someone asked me for an article about my top ten dystopias. Then the Mortal Engines movie stopped looming, and they lost interest. But I found my rough draft for the piece in my notes, and thought it might be worth posting here. I only got as far as seven and a half dystopias, and I tried to define ‘dystopia’ pretty loosely. Also, with the exception of the final (joke)entry, I tried to stick to those which influenced my own writing, and particularly the writing of Mortal Engines. This means that a) it skews heavily towards stuff that was around in the 1980s, and b) I left out things like The Hunger Games, A Clockwork Orange, A Handmaid’s Tale etc, not because I think they’re inferior, but because I didn’t encounter them until later. And I left out 1984 and Brave New World because they felt too obvious.


In other words, don’t @ me.

Mordor as imagined by Alan Lee

1 The Lord of the Rings

Middle Earth may look pretty, but it is a world in decline. The elves are leaving, the great days and great deeds of its heroes lie far behind it, and the lesser heroes of the Third Age keep tripping over the ruins of castles and cities built by kings whose names have faded into the grass. Once you get across the borders of Mordor, of course, you’re in a pure dystopia; a harsh, joyless, militarised, environmentally blighted landscape populated by armoured orcs and other unsavoury types, and watched over by the all-seeing eye of Sauron. For all the fantasy trappings, it’s a very Twentieth Century surveillance state, a reminder that Tolkien was writing in the era of Hitler and Stalin. It was the first true fictional dystopia I ever met.

2 Mad Max

There’s a profound reason why dystopias appeal to the imaginations of low-budget film-makers - they’re cheap. At least, I imagine that was the impulse which led the young George Miller and his associates to set their movie ‘the day after tomorrow’, in an Australia slightly more lawless, violent and prone to high-speed carnage than their own. I saw it only once, a long time ago, and don’t remember enjoying it. But enough people did that Max returned, madder than ever, in a sequel, the imaginatively-titled Mad Max 2, and he had raised his game considerably. Now explicitly set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the second film is a brutal punk western with the simplest set-up and the most ecstatically choreographed mayhem I’d ever seen. The third effort, Beyond Thunderdome, swerved away from the X-Certificate stuff as if hoping to pick up the Raiders of the Lost Ark crowd, and ends up not quite satisfying anyone, but it’s still full of good things, like Tina Turner as a post-apocalyptic tyrant and the Riddley Walker-ish patois spoken by the gang of kids Max ends up rescuing. And of course Fury Road, which I wrote about here*, is the only reboot of a 70s/80s franchise I can think of that actually builds and improves on the originals.

*I’ll spare you the link, which will probably misdirect you to a spam site. At some stage I may gather up the reviews I wrote for my old blog and repost them here.

3 Quatermass IV

Nigel Kneale’s legendary Quatermass serials pretty much invented TV sci-fi in this country. Broadcast on the BBC in the 50s, the first three are bleak, brilliant and inventive tales of alien invasion and human beings being taken over by strange forces, which still have the power to scare today. A few years ago I was lucky enough to attend a talk by the great children’s author Judith Kerr, who was married to Kneale, and when she mentioned that he’d written Quatermass an audible frisson ran through the audience.

Growing up in the 70s, pre-video and internet, I didn’t get a chance to see the original three series, so my first encounter with Kneale’s work was the 1979 ITV miniseries starring Sir John Mills and simply called Quatermass. Unlike the others, which were set pretty much in their own present day, this later version fast forwards a few years into the future, and into a compelling vision of a third-world Britain where law and order have broken down and the cities have become battlegrounds for gangs of heavily armed youths and mercenary South African ‘paycops’. The few young people who aren’t busy machine-gunning one other prance around the country as part of a hippy cult called the Planet People, gathering at stone circles, where they believe they’ll be beamed up by aliens. And it turns out they’re sort of right; humanity is periodically harvested by some extra-terrestrial power which values us as seasoning or something, and the old circles mark places where lemming-like crowds of celebrants gathered in the past to be vaporised.

It’s less well-regarded than the earlier Quatermasses (or Quatermassi?). For one thing, it’s a bit oddly paced - it was shot as a four-hour miniseries, but with the option to cut it down into a two-hour film; as a result, the series feels draggy and over-padded, while the film version misses out loads of good character stuff. Also, the idea that young people are the ones susceptible to alien influence and it’s the old fuddy-duddies who have to save the day makes millennial reviewers recoil in horror and brand it curmudgeonly and conservative. Which it is, but brilliantly and hilariously so. Anyway, the extra-terrestrial threat is all the more chilling for being off-stage and completely unknowable, and the scenes where our heroes drive along abandoned motorways while the radio news-reader rounds off each bulletin by announcing tomorrow’s power cuts felt to my 14-year-old self like the cold breath of the oncoming future.

3 1/2 The Year of the Sex Olympics

An honourable mention here for another Kneale dystopia, The Year of the Sex Olympics, in which the elite programme-makers of a future society spend their lives distracting the vast, unemployed underclass by producing endless low-brow TV broadcasts about food and sex. Eventually, looking for new opiates for the masses, the hero and his family go off to live alone on a remote island where their every moment is televised, effectively inventing reality TV. Like a lot of Kneale’s work it’s dated badly in terms of production values, but not at all in its dark wit. It starts out as a rather funny satire, but gets darker and darker until it ends with a scene of extraordinary bleakness, the hero in a moment of despair reaching for words to express himself and finding they no longer exist - language itself has been eroded away by the tide of rubbish telly.

Dystopian fashion from the Year of the Sex Olympics

4 Brazil

Where would I be without Terry Gilliam’s Brazil? It was a sort of touchstone for me all through my late teens and twenties, and it’s definitely one of the places Mortal Engines comes from. It’s also, without a doubt, Gilliam’s best film: I want to like the others, I sometimes do enjoy them, but Brazil is the only time he managed to anchor his surrealist visuals to a script that’s really worthy of them (possibly because of the presence of Tom Stoppard as script doctor). Originally called 1984-and-a-half and set ‘somewhere in the 20th Century’, Brazil drops us with no warning at all into a bleak retro-future full of crazy Kafkaesque bureaucracy, malfunctioning plumbing, clanking 1940s computers, random terrorist attacks and rampant consumerism.

I suspect Brazil started out as a satire on life under Labour governments (the repair men from Central Services who eventually arrive to fix the hero’s plumbing are familiar types to anyone who tried to get a phone installed in the UK during the 1970s) and was then retrofitted with a bit of anti-consumerism under Mrs Thatcher. The result is an odd bit of world-building - a socialist-looking surveillance state where people are bombarded with adverts telling them to shop, shop, shop - but it turned out to be strangely prescient. (The weird zone which sprang up around the 2012 London Olympics, where the state protected the monopolies of officially sanctioned stores and brands, was pure Brazil.) Watching it again recently, I couldn’t help noticing that there comes a point where it loses momentum and starts to circle and repeat itself, but the first hour is magnificent, and so is the ending. Jonathan Pryce is great as the gentle dreamer trying to navigate this weird landscape, Michael Palin’s affable torturer is a perfect bit of casting-against-type, and Bob Hoskins's malevolent repairman jeering contemptuously, ‘Fings don’t fix vemselves’ echoes in my mind every time a technical glitch seems to clear up of its own accord.

5 Blade Runner

I’ve written about Blade Runner elsewhere, but it’s too important not to include in this list. I saw it again with my son recently and he spotted all the plot-holes instantly. At his age, I was too dazzled to care; with its intricate production design and lurid cruelty it exerted a powerful influence on a) me and b) pop culture in general. If you had to pick one interior to sum up the artsier end of the 1980s it would be J F Sebastian’s apartment in the semi-derelict Bradbury Building, full of dripping stairways, sweeping blue searchlight beams, rain, Vangelis music, slow-motion doves, piles of old books, creepy dolls, Victorian automata, punks and pierrots, all swathed in an artfully backlit pop video haze. Duran Duran could have moved in without changing a thing. David Bowie was so taken with it all that within a year he’d dye his hair peroxide blonde and go Rutger Hauering up and down Thai escalators till the security guards told him to hop it.

6 Diamond Dogs

I said at the top that I wasn’t going to write about 1984, but if you’re writing about dystopias you have to write about 1984 in the end, for so many of those written since have drawn on it for inspiration - see Brazil, above, and Nigel Kneale, who wrote a hugely successful BBC adaptation. David Bowie, high on fame and Bolivian Marching Powder in the early 1970s, decided to turn 1984 into a stage musical, and even I, who worship Bowie as a sort of household god, feel quite relieved that George Orwell’s estate stepped in to put a stop to it. Some of the songs and ideas found their way instead onto Diamond Dogs, a strange album with an even stranger cover.

Listeners more musical than I seem to feel it lacks something (most noticeably Mick Ronson’s guitar and arrangements, he and his fellow Spiders from Mars having been ditched by this point). It was always one of my favourites, though, and without the need for a narrative it does create its own weird world pretty effectively by just throwing strange, disconnected images at you. The suite of songs which dominated side one of my old LP - Sweet Thing - Candidate - Sweet Thing (reprise) is glorious, and a forerunner of other tripartite Bowie epics like Station to Station and Blackstar. And the weird electronic howl which kicks off proceedings at the start of Future Legend was the noise that echoed in my head when I started writing about Fever Crumb’s derelict future London.

7 Twitter

The last track on Diamond Dogs opens with the lyric, ‘We’ll build a glass asylum...’ Presumably written using the William Burroughs cut-up technique of scribbling words on darts and chucking them at a sheet of A4 while off your chump on powerful drugs, it sounded a bit unlikely even in the 1970s. But here we are in the 21st century and all the kinks, quirks and psyochopathies of our fellow citizens are on display 24/7 in the vast, transparent Bedlam that is social media. Peering unwisely into its grubby vitrines, we discover that friends and acquaintances we once thought perfectly normal actually believe lunatic conspiracy theories about photoshopped hats*. Meanwhile in the White House khazi, the gangster president of the United States takes out his i-phone and prepares to Tweet…We fantasise about abandoning the sordid hell-site and just leaving the alt-right and alt-left to fight it out, like Prof Quatermass fleeing riot-torn London for the countryside, but it’s highly addictive, and anyway we’re having so much fun with the poisonous people, spreading rumours and lies and stories they made up. How is a mere writer of fiction supposed to compete with this stuff? The darkest and most implausible dystopias are always the real ones.

*The 'photoshopped hat' reference really dates this piece. Other lunatic conspiracy theories are now available.