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Le site SFSignal.com publie un article de John H Stevens intitulé 'The Way Is Open If We Want to Take It': The Dystopian Spirit in 21st-Century SF dans lequel l'auteur tente de comprendre et d'expliquer comment les auteurs actuels se servent ou tentent d'instaurer dans leurs oeuvres un esprit dystopique.
Il analyse ainsi "Amaryllis," de Carrie Vaughn, "Pop Squad", de Paolo Bacigalupi, "Auspicious Eggs" de James Morrow et enfin "Resistance", de Tobias Buckell's.

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Citation:

The title of this week's column is taken from a passage in A. M. Lightner's The Day of the Drones (which I was led to by Jame Donaworth's chapter "Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia in the Dark Horizons anthology) I like the quotation because it makes a strong statement about dystopia, particularly in its more recent iterations. It speaks to character agency and possibility, to the rupturing of the idea of the classic, monolithic dystopias of the past. It also exemplifies the development of new visions of dystopia; which, as I noted last week, Samuel R. Delany characterized as having "gone beyond this irreconcilable Utopian/Dystopian conflict to produce a more fruitful model against which to compare human development." But in the new century, what has dystopia developed into in adult SF? This week I would like to look at how writers of SF are using and elaborating the dystopian spirit. The best way to do this succinctly, but with some variety, was to focus on short stories, which I find are often ignored in analyses of dystopian literature. While they lack the vast detail of a novel, short stories can deliver the essence of dystopia with concision and emotional impact. Since I want to look at recent work, I decided to choose some stories from John Joseph Adams' new collection Brave New Worlds. I recommend it highly for its combination of classic stories with newer tales that demonstrate the ingenuity that writers have garnered from the idea of dystopia. What do these stories tell us about the ways in which the idea of dystopia is expressed in SF, and do they address the concerns that dystopia has historically dealt with? Is Paolo Bacigalupi's worry, which seems like a concern that dystopia could be used to explicate, being addressed by other writers? What is remarkable is that the majority of the stories I found to be most powerful and compelling were concerned with population control or its antithesis. The first was Carrie Vaughn's "Amaryllis," the story of a future of scarce resources that requires draconian population control. In the end, the story is less about resisting the tenets of the social system and more about personal epiphany. The dystopian aspects of the story were muted, and I found myself wondering if it qualified as such, but it certainly exemplified John Joseph Adams' criterion of telling us something about people, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw glimmers of Vaughn using the dystopian spirit to do something different.

La suite et plus de détails ici

Priscilla Duran-Mulas