Dystopian meaning

• Relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.

  ‘the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason’

  • ‘the utopian dream that became a dystopian nightmare’
  • ‘For his dystopian vision of the future, George Orwell chose the year 1984.’
  • ‘Like the novel, it portrays Gilead, a dystopian society not too far in the future.’
  • ‘Both McLuhan's and Marcuse's dissection of modern technology is neither dystopian nor pessimistic.’
  • ‘Now seems an apt time to stage George Orwell's dystopian novel about the corruption of language.’
  • ‘What's off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them.’
  • ‘Not all of his admirers were fully aware of the satirical or dystopian aspects of his work, however.’
  • ‘Neither do I agree with the even more dystopian picture of entire nation states now under threat from the new terrorist activities.’
  • ‘Blackly funny and chillingly dystopian, Battle Royale has been having quite a resurgence recently.’
  • ‘These 1960s science-fiction films were aimed at a critical adult audience and were categorized as dystopian and post-holocaust.’
  • ‘The novel conjures up a lawless dystopian world of youth violence and institutional mind-manipulation.’

• A person who imagines or foresees a state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.

  ‘a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true’

  • ‘Yet, this technological naivety finally does not matter, for the dystopians' purpose is moral and political.’
  • ‘It is not surprising that the two greatest literary dystopians, Huxley and Orwell, were English.’
  • ‘British dystopian Watkins prophesizes in his film that protestors and lefties are arrested, tried, and surreptitiously executed in the desert.’
  • ‘This nostalgic embrace of primitiveness leads dystopians to interpret every technological advance as another step toward an ultimately dehumanized existence.’
  • ‘For some dystopians, new technology is a source of control.’
  • ‘I'm not an Internet utopian, but I'm not an Internet dystopian either.’
  • ‘I am not a dystopian who thinks that making some efforts to make tools for slaughtering large numbers of people inaccessible to maniacs will transform America into Amerika.’
  • ‘Dystopians, in contradistinction to utopians, believe that technology is more regressive than progressive, more a force for evil than good.’

• An imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

  ‘environmental disaster is the backdrop to this modern dystopia’

  • ‘It's extremely difficult to imagine a realistic dystopia because we're so tempted to create a caricature.’
  • ‘Orwell's genius was to take the theme of a totalitarian dystopia to the max.’
  • ‘It is hardly surprising that a century of utopian dreams and coercive social engineering to achieve them should have been a century rich in imaginative dystopias.’
  • ‘The two works together conjuring the horror of a dystopia which is never as far away as you might imagine.’
  • ‘It's set in a future dystopia, where a lone individual fights against a totalitarian regime.’
  • ‘But in his 1932 novel Brave New World, he created one of the truly memorable 20th-century dystopias, which is also one of the most frighteningly pessimistic.’
  • ‘Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance.’
  • ‘A combination of greed, corruption and bad planning has transformed many cities into polluted dystopias, friendly neither to the bike nor the human being.’
  • ‘Yet in the dystopias of his late novels, the evil of oligarchic collectivism crowds out the petty, everyday struggle for socialist policies in this world.’
  • ‘‘The future,’ as a social construct, is commonly understood in terms of utopias and dystopias.’
  • ‘Will all tomorrow's cinematic dystopias be virtual?’
  • ‘Unlike many science fiction dystopias, this one seems uncomfortably realistic.’
  • ‘These dystopias of capitalism are squeezing out communities' hope as they sedate them with the best salaries around.’
  • ‘The swarm is a recurring form of force in our dystopias and fears of destruction.’
  • ‘The story is a delirious, chaotic, often impenetrable allegory of tribalism in an industrial dystopia.’
  • ‘By using existing modernist architecture for locations, and having their characters speak a mutated form of English, they persuasively create a high-tech dystopia.’
  • ‘Virilio writes about the dystopia that has already happened.’
  • ‘The filmmaker just can't help himself - leave it to him to find a silver lining in the dystopia he so carefully sets up.’
  • ‘My favourite genre is the dystopia, and this novel is filled with references to a horrible future, filled with fascists and war.’
  • ‘In Metropolis, Fritz Lang had the office as an urban dystopia with workers shuffling about in smocks with bowed heads, sedated by repetition.’

Late 18th century from dys-‘bad’ + utopia.