Dystopian Fiction after 9/11: Guest Post by John G. Nelson

By John G. Nelson

The news headlines in the years following 9/11 read like an Orwellian dystopia.  

Secret prisons, torture, extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, domestic spying, suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, ignoring the Geneva Convention, and wars built on falsified intelligence peppered the headlines and spurred a national debate.

As a fiction writer, I didn’t have to look too far for my material or ponder a dystopian society a hundred years in the future to come up with a storyline. I wondered how we would react now to a catastrophic event greater than a terrorist bombing or a broken levy. In my new novel Against Nature, I created a global pandemic; a disease without a cure. To spice it up a bit I made the harbinger of destruction an unidentified microbe introduced to earth in the wound of an astronaut. With no natural human immunity to the organism and no known treatment regimen, the fatal disease spreads unabated. The U.S is ground zero for the contagion and the already existing cracks in our society become a deep fissure.  

I took the sins of the past decade, magnified the recent rise of Social Darwinists on the political scene in Washington, and added in a catastrophic event and what came out the other end was a frightening and all too plausible dystopia in the spirit of Orwell, Huxley and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.

A fictitious global pandemic is certainly not a new concept.  In fact, Hollywood recently released the film Contagion. It’s a decent movie about a global pandemic though it probably falls within the genre of disaster film more than a dystopia.  Nonetheless, in typical Hollywood fashion, American scientists save the day by finding a vaccine. The vaccination plan is egalitarian with the vaccine being distributed by lottery and the crowds line up in an orderly manner. It feels good to feel good.

In reality, if we had an experimental vaccine for a fatal and highly contagious disease that was spreading across the globe, would we distribute it in an egalitarian way?  Would the Wall Street banker be vaccinated over a common laborer and the venture capitalist over the school teacher? In Against Nature, the vaccination plan is based on one’s future labor value to the stock market. I felt this concept more closely reflected reality. Fiction doesn’t have to always be feel-good delusion wrapped up in a tidy package. Sometimes it needs to hit close to home and shake loose your moorings.

I think the best works of dystopian fiction allows us to see a reflection of our own society and offers us road signs on how we got to the dystopian future. I don’t think you need to necessarily devise a post-apocalyptic landscape as the vehicle for a dystopian tale.  In Against Nature I wanted to take the reader from the present and deliver them into the dystopia. I found the road signs were ever present in our contemporary society and didn’t feel I needed to imagine a nuclear apocalyptic landscape to get us into an Orwellian-like society. Sometimes you just need to look around you and imagine what may lie ahead if we continue on the road we’re on.

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John Nelson is a retired Air Force Master Sergeant and former Special Forces Medic—Air Commando. His novel Against Nature is available as an eBook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks and from the publisher wildchildpublishing.com

For professional reviews of his book and author interviews please visit his blog: johngnelson.blogspot.com