I’ve always been a fan of dystopian novels. 

The Hunger Games, where children fight each other to the death in order to preserve peace, somehow. The Handmaid’s Tale, where women are enslaved to men, either as servants or baby-makers. 1984, government surveillance. Brave New World, people are robotic and live in castes. The Giver. The works of Don DeLillo, my chosen author of study in my honors English class during my junior year of high school.

Dystopian fiction, if you’ve never heard of the genre, is an imagined community or society that is dehumanizing and frightening.

My bookshelf is filled with alternate, future worlds that are more in reach than we might like to think. What most, if not all, of these dystopias have in common is what led to them: war. Sometimes, there’s a fall of government that leads to the rise of another more oppressive one. 

The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel by Margaret Atwood, but you might be more familiar with the television show, on Hulu. I recently finished the novel and am watching it right now, which hasn’t been pleasant, considering the dystopian society began with, you guessed it, the takedown of Congress and led to a living nightmare. 

On Jan. 6, supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building as Congress convened to certify the electoral college results. They broke through the doors, with what goal, I’m not sure, but it happened. 

I don’t want to provide too much commentary on the events of Jan. 6, because there’s enough of that out there without me adding more of it. I’ll just add my perspective as a young person who conceivably has a lot of years left in this world and an English major with an affinity for scary books.

First of all, I wonder what the authors of these dystopian works have to say about events of the past year. If any of you are reading this, please let me know. 

Headlines now read like dystopian novels. One that surfaced on my phone made me laugh in its absurdity. From The Washington Post: Lawmakers may have been exposed to the coronavirus in Capitol lockdown, attending physician says. Imagine reading that sentence one year ago. I’m so numb to the world’s happenings these days, that when everything happened last Wednesday, I hardly reacted for the first few hours. Once I came home, turned on the television and really took in what I was seeing, I realized how real it all was and how unreal it would have seemed a short time ago. 

Scrolling through Twitter that evening, I saw a few things that made me shiver. First, there was a noose tied out of cords from abandoned news cameras. Second, there was an image of the words “murder the media” etched into a set of doors within the Capitol building. 

Another fun part of dystopian novels, you may be familiar with, is the loss of a free press. Sometimes it’s replaced with government-issued propaganda, but in other stories, there is nothing there at all. Citizens, in these currently fictional worlds, know nothing. 

A similar phenomenon is in the beginning stages, has been for a few years now. People are operating on different sets of facts. There’s a widespread distrust of news media to the point where there are almost different realities. 

If you disagree with me on these matters, take a moment to think about it. Here, in the United States of America today, that’s ok. We’re still free to think and say what we want to. In these futuristic novels or movies you may or may not have seen, disagreement usually ends badly, at least in the middle of the plot when the dystopia is still intact. 

I want to tell my grandchildren about the day some crazy folks stormed the Capitol building in support of a sitting president many, many years from now, and for them to be surprised. For them to be unable to conceive something like that happening. 

I want to read these books 20 years from now and to enjoy the stories. For them to be just that, stories. Make-believe.