Dystopia : a review

Abstract

Conzalo’s utopia is seen to be a chimera, something impossible to achieve, something which will be in no place, the meaning of utopia. The opposite of this is, of course, ‘dystopia’, with its connotation of disorder, discord, disruption, disillusion. Its meaning is the opposite of both connotations of utopia (perfect place and no place): unpleasant place – or every place. Therefore, the imaginative portrayal of dystopia shows us what is around us, what besets our psyches and our societies. To overcome this, priests and prophets, politicians and philosophers, artists and writers, on occasion try to show us how to attain utopia. Because of the human condition, this, however, is always doomed to failure.