An article I wrote for The Curious Reader about the key elements in my dystopian novel Our Dried Voices and other classics in the genre.
Thanks to a young adult boom and television and film adaptations, the dystopian genre is riding a comeback. Authors who write dystopian novels have a new audience eager for stories that play on modern anxieties and inspire change.
But as the subjects of dystopian fiction shift from nuclear weapons and totalitarian states to climate disasters and gender equality, it is worth examining the mechanisms behind the dystopian genre. Drawing on classic dystopian fiction and my own writing experience, here is a primer on how dystopian novels are written.