May 28, 1998

dystopia

I read in a magazine about H.G.Wells's "dystopian fantasy." I looked it up in my dictionaries and did not find "dystopia." Separating its prefix "dys-" and comparing it to "u"topia I came to the conclusion that it is some kind of "opposite" of the ideal state that "utopia" indicates. Is it? Since I couldn't find it in my dictionaries, is it in use?

Yes.

The word utopia, first of all, which means 'any ideal place or state', was coined by Sir Thomas More from Greek elements meaning 'no place'. It does not come from Greek elements meaning 'a good place', which would be eutopia.

Dystopia is a well-established word--it is now found in most college-size dictionaries--that was first used by John Stuart Mill in 1868, though it appears to have not caught on immediately, and was re-coined in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then it has been in relatively frequent use chiefly in the sense 'an imaginary society in which social or technological trends have culminated in a greatly diminished quality of life or degradation of values', and hence 'a representation (as a book) of such a society'. Two prime examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. The word is formed from the Greek negative prefix dys- 'bad; ill' ("dyslexia") and (u)topia, which, as noted, does not etymologically mean 'good place', but carries that meaning, which dys- negates, nonetheless.

Another word to consider is anti-utopia, which dates from the late 1960s. Sometimes anti-utopia is used as a synonym for dystopia. At other times, though, the two words are considered to have different nuances--for example, dystopia is used to mean 'a horrible place', while anti-utopia is used to mean 'a place or society intended to be utopian but that has been perverted and is now horrible'. Unless you're doing much lit-crit, though, you can probably treat the two words as synonymous.

Finally, we should take passing note of cacotopia, from the prefix caco- 'bad', also synonymous with dystopia. Cacotopia is only found in two sources in the nineteenth century, but I'll throw it in to be complete.