Why I call my books “dystopian” even though I don’t think they are
I sometimes use the word “dystopian” when I’m asked what I write, because it’s a useful shorthand. But every time I reach for it, there’s a small part of me that thinks: that’s not quite right.
Here’s the thing about dystopian fiction: it’s a warning. It says, this is what happens if we get it wrong. The society has failed, usually completely, and the story is about surviving the wreckage or fighting to tear it down. That’s a powerful tradition, and a lot of science fiction I love sits comfortably inside it. But it’s not what I’m doing. What I’m doing is closer to an argument that the future won’t be a clean failure or a clean success — it’ll be both, tangled together, the way it already is.
The world of Humanity’s Hope
Take my novel, Humanity’s Hope. The Earth my colonists are leaving has space elevators. Hypervelocity trains move people and goods at speeds we can barely imagine today. Ambulances with cryogenic chambers can freeze patients on the spot, and magnetocaloric heat pumps create a clean source of energy. By almost any measure, humanity has achieved things.
And also: there’s no free healthcare. Underemployment is endemic—not from a lack of work, but because human labour is only used when it’s cheaper than automation, or beyond the capability of AI. Climate change has displaced millions, and those refugees are living with the consequences of decisions made by people who will never have to.
That’s not a broken society. It’s a society that got very good at some things and never got around to fixing others — which, if I’m honest, sounds a lot like the one we’re already living in.
The inversion
My next novel flips the trade-off entirely. It’s set in a society run by an AI that has solved the big material problems. No war. No poverty. Everyone has the time to pursue whatever they want — hobbies, art, rest. If you described just that to someone, they’d probably call it a utopia.
But there’s a cost, and it’s not a small one: almost no human agency. Very little meaningful work. The global AI has made life comfortable by making most human decisions unnecessary, and it turns out that a life with no material lack and no real say in your own future is its own kind of loss.
Put the two books side by side and you get a shape I find much more interesting than “dystopia”: one society has material scarcity alongside technological plenty; the other has material plenty alongside a different kind of scarcity — purpose, agency, meaning. Neither one is a warning about collapse. They’re both questions about what we’re willing to trade for what.
Extrapolation, not warning
That’s really the difference for me. Dystopian fiction typically asks, what if this goes wrong? I’m more interested in asking, what if we just keep going? — no catastrophe, no evil regime, just the trends already shaping our lives (automation, inequality, climate stress, the slow renegotiation of what counts as “enough”) carried forward another fifty or a hundred years, with all their upsides intact too. Progress doesn’t erase problems. It usually just relocates them, or creates new ones shaped like solutions.
I think that’s a more useful kind of speculation than dystopia, and a more honest one. It doesn’t let the reader off the hook by making the future someone else’s disaster to avoid. It asks them to sit with a future that’s recognisably better in some ways and worse in others, and to notice how uncomfortable that mix actually is — because I suspect that discomfort is closer to what’s coming than a clean fall from grace.
So why keep the label?
Practically: because “dystopian” is a word readers already use to find books like mine. It’s a shelf, a search term, a genre shorthand that gets someone from “I like speculative fiction about societies under pressure” to my books in one click. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t matter.
So I’ll keep using it — with a small, private asterisk. If you’ve read this far, consider yourself let in on it. My books aren’t warnings about a world that’s gone wrong. They’re questions about a world that’s gone somewhere, unevenly, the way worlds tend to.
