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Hello again and welcome to another week of videos. As with all of the last weeks, my topic for this

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week's videos is something that has been inspired by an activity that I've been doing during

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quarantine and that is reading. So I've been doing a lot of reading during this time because I have

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a bit of extra free time, more than I have in a normal situation, and I have just started reading

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Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. And it inspired me to talk about one of my favorite genres of

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literature, which is dystopian literature. So the definition of a dystopia for me is really tied

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with the definition of a utopia. So a utopia is an ideal community or society. Everything is,

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you know, supposedly perfect. You can think of the Garden of Eden, maybe in the Bible is what

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I like to think of as an imagined utopia. And a dystopia is kind of the foil to that utopia. So

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it is an imagined or invented society in which there is great suffering or injustice.

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And usually that comes with a government or controlling class or person that is totalitarian

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or maybe it's post-apocalyptic. Maybe there was this big apocalypse or an apocalyptic event and

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this society has formed after, and it's dystopian. So some examples are, in literature, you can see

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The Giver. That's one of my favorite novels, and I will be talking about it in the next video.

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There's obviously Fahrenheit 451. You have 1984, and maybe some more modern examples are The Hunger

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Games or Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Hunger Games have been made into a movie series.

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Handmaid's Tale has been made into a TV series as well.

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Some people ask me, isn't that just depressing to, you know, read dystopian novels?

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Doesn't it remind you of all the bad in the world or things like that?

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And my answer to that is, you know, it could be for some.

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Maybe it is a little bit depressing for some people to read dystopian novels.

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But for me, I am someone who loves to think about society and the choices that we make

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as a society and how we organize, um, which is one of the reasons I majored in sociology in college.

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Um, and to me, a really fascinating element of dystopian novels, um, or a lot of dystopian

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novels is that many of these works, uh, talk about dystopian societies as being a result

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of people originally trying to make society better. So maybe a society is trying to become

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less violent and because of that or more equal and because of that they take away certain freedoms

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and of course in a dystopian novel that fails and it results in a dystopian society in a negative

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a society that's negative for a lot of other reasons but I think it's interesting to see the

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ways that these societies fail especially if they're originally trying to do good and I think

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it can serve as a cautionary tale in a really interesting and unique way. So for me, that's

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one of the reasons that I love dystopian literature, and I'm excited to talk with you about it a bit

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more in the coming videos.