Like many people, I've been thinking quite a lot lately about apocalypse and dystopia.

Thread.

There's an interesting thread on Apocalypse from @elizabethjdias that you might have seen. If you haven't, it's worth reading, and some of what I've been thinking about she says in that thread. https://twitter.com/elizabethjdias/status/1245696202290728961

In particular I've been thinking about two aspects of Apocalypse and Apocalyptic fiction that Dias mentions: the idea of revelation and the stark before and after.

As she says, "Apocalypse" is Greek for unveiling or revelation. And apocalypses, historical, religious, and fictional, are all about revealing. They reveal weaknesses in the political or social structures. They reveal God's intention for the world.

Dystopias are also revealing. Dystopia is made-up-Greek for "bad place," and is a spin on "utopia," a neologisim by Thomas More. As I have argued elsewhere (and was not a new insight by me) dystopia is one of the literary genres that demands acknowledgement of an author's intent.

Literary critics tend to bristle at acknowledgement that the author's intention matters, but although we can call something drama if it follows the conventions of drama, and don't need to care what he author meant it to be, dystopia and utopia are both judgements.

To qualify as a dystopia a story has to depict a world that the author or the reader or both recognize to be significantly worse than the real world.

Dystopias aren't just bad. They're worse. Worse than real. And therefore they're always about the present of the writing.

Dystopian stories reveal something about the present--often but not always a warning or an exaggerated criticism.

What dystopia does not require, but apocalypse does, is a before and an after.

Dias points out that apocalyptic stories require a good before and a bad after. That's as true of fictional apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic stories as it is of religious apocalypses. A dystopia is a bad place, but a post-apocalyptic world has BECOME bad.

The opposite of dystopia, as I said, is utopia: a genre we don't see very often, and one that is just as revealing as its counterpart.

Utopias, like dystopias, are always about the time and place of the writing. They're utopian to the degree that they are understood to be better than the real world.

Utopias are often just as critical of the real world as dystopias are: they elucidate the faults of the real world by contrast. Utopias don't have to be perfect, just like dystopias don't have to be irredeemable. They just have to be better.

If apocalyptic stories are stories that have a clear divide of good before and bad after, is there a utopian counterpart of apocalypse? In religious terms apocalypses can be good--the Christian apocalypse is, in the end. What about in fictional terms?

Arguably V for Vendetta ends in a good apocalypse, because society collapses and the result is something better. Are there any other good examples?