Utopia, a place where all our wishes come true and we all live happily ever after. A place where food is plenty and freedom is free. Utopia is a place of happiness but with such a good life comes much sacrifice. This illusion of a perfect world grabs us and whisks us away to a place that hides dark secrets and terrible truths. A dystopia is a society that tries to be a utopia but ultimately leads to a inhumane society.

Dystopias usually form when someone tries to make a utopia. A dystopia is the opposite of a utopia being a place that looks perfect but has some harsh reality. In some dystopian stories there is a single person who tries the fight against the government. Our protagonist tries to fight the system and resist. I believe that dystopian literature is rising in popularity because of the rebel that the protagonist portrays or the way that that world relates to our own. People like to imagine themselves as this great individual that rebels and adventures against this horrible society. They like to experience the suspense as they unlock the secrets and truths about their society. Dystopian literature immerses the reader into a land of action, adventure, and suspense making them feel like they are in the story. They start to think

Not all stories have a good ending. In fact, rarely do we see a good ending in dystopian literature. One of these stories is “Harrison Bergeron”, where a society is made equal by handicaps given to them. “No one is smarter, stronger, or prettier than anyone else”. George and Hazel Bergeron had a son who was perfect. He was strong, handsome, and smart. He was Harrison Bergeron the perfect human. The society was controlled by a person known as the Handicapper General who had all the power. Harrison tried to stand up against the system but ultimately was killed by the General leaving the society back to normal.

Harrison Bergeron was a society where everyone was equal, but some societies relied on the importance of their children and their people. “Ten with a flag” is a story about a couple who live in a society where a place called Central can predict how important your child will be to society. The children where then given a number one through ten affecting how their life is going to be like. The couple that the story focuses on has a baby that is rated a ten. Their perfect baby however has what is called a flag. A flag means that the parents will encounter hardships in their future and the father thought this meant one thing, the death of the mother through birth. The father tried to abort the baby but “Central was in control” and with that Central prevented the father from aborting the baby and had him downgraded from a 8 to a 1 the lowest class. Central controls their car, jobs, and life no one has free will but everyone is granted the illusion of it

With technology you can control a lot of things, but what happens when technology goes too far. “The Veldt” is a story about a world where technology does everything. The family in the story bought a house that uses said technology. Their favorite part of the house is the simulation room which changes its environment  to anything they think of. The parents soon learn that the simulation room shows nothing but a African veldt with lions hunting in the distance. The children grow attached to their way of life thinking of the machines as their guardians. The parents start to worry for their children and themselves because of the screams that echo from the room disguised as a veldt, so they prepare to turn off the house. Crying and whining the children beg their parents to turn on the room one last time, and being irresponsible parents they give in to the children’s pleas. The children yell to their parents that they want to show them something and lock the parents inside the simulation room with the lions that prey the veldt and on go’s a suspenseful scream they had heard many times, their screams.

In the end of all these stories a rising action comes to a sudden and dramatic fall. These stories draw us in with their perfect yet eerie worlds. Worlds that could possible be our future. The stories relate in a multitude of ways, some being the societies they portray being perfect or The feeling that we are in the stories and the reality behind these false worlds is why I think they are rising in popularity. The alluring story combined with the suspense draws many readers of all ages and type.