Plenty of Blame to Spread Around: Dystopia(nism) and the Cold War

Abstract

The willingness of both the United States and the Soviet Union to defend their ostensibly incompatible ideologies with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons presented a ready-made situation for dystopian fiction’s ironic troubling of utopian propositions. Many of the most immediately recognisable dystopian works from the Cold War arose from the two superpowers or from nations allied with them. As the chapter examines, such relatively familiar works tended to criticise inherent flaws within one or both of the Cold War’s dominant ideologies. However, the chapter also addresses the extensive body of dystopian literature produced by authors from the ʼnon-aligned’ nations and that collectively revealed how the Cold War indirectly and directly deformed the societies it dismissively lumped together as the ‘Third World’.