Weslina Hung

English 149

Final Essay

Art imitates life, as a common saying goes. Whether it is paintings by Rembrandt, music by Mendelssohn, or poetry by Dickinson, any work of artistry is affected by the creator’s experiences. Following that line of thought, the creator’s life experiences are influenced by the society, culture, and time frame he or she lives in. In literature, speculative fiction is a curious genre that reimagines the past or constructs a future. The author takes what they know and how they feel about current events, and creates a “what if” scenario. Without the knowledge of major historical events, these speculative fiction novels would have no basis; they are heavily reliant on what happens in the mundane world. Dystopian novels are a subgenre under this category of fiction. The twisted offspring of utopian literature (inspired by the original Utopia by Sir Thomas More), dystopian novels create “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived.” (Lyman Tower Sargent) It is a projection of what the author believes may happen in the future according to circumstances at the time. As a result, the genre as a whole shifts and changes with history. Dystopian writing focuses on what society thinks is a problem, whether it be political, environmental, or social. But to what extent? A project team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explored the ties between dystopian fiction and major events of the 20th century in a research project, named the Big Brot(hers).

The project was actually an amalgamation of several, smaller projects. The research components involved many steps; the team first put together a corpus of what was objectively considered to be the most influential novels of the time frame. This was difficult to accomplish with limited time and resources, as well as a budget of exactly zero dollars and zero cents. So, in a rather objective fashion, the researchers based their choices on the frequency each book appeared in critical reviews or scholarly articles they found during their research. In the end, the group selected twenty five well-known books, of whose dates written were spaced evenly throughout the century. They started from The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908) and ended with The Children of Men by P.D. James (1992). Arguably the most famous of these works were 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, all of which are part of the standard high school curriculum. However, this is not to say that the other books were not almost equally influential and familiar to modern readers. The aim was to find books that were so influential that their readership continued on to the 21th century. In a crowdsourcing effort, a simple synopsis and a list of important themes of each novel or short story were obtained from both summaries from Wikipedia.org entries as well as Goodreads.com reviews by readers from across the world. This was necessary because the project team of five members did not find it practical to read all twenty-five books themselves within the given time frame. This data was mapped onto a timeline using a web tool called Tiki-Toki. Afterwards, major historical events were added to the timeline; this includes events such as WWI and II, the Great Depression, and the Second Wave Feminist Movement. The results were much as the research team expected; the themes and plotlines of the stories very much corresponded with global events that occurred during or before the writing. War and political strife motifs were prevalent during the world wars, scares of Communism emerged during the Cold War era, and stories involving wild new technologies popped up as new inventions and scientific discoveries were made. Researchers found that both major events and dystopian novels occurred heavily towards the latter end of the 20th century. the latter half of the 1900s seemed to have much more political activity. In the aftermath of World War II, political revolutions occurred left and right, as the United States fought through both the passive-aggressive Cold War and the controversial Vietnam War. In addition, the Second Wave of Feminism started gathering strength. This combination of new occurrences moved many writers into imagining their own dystopias as 16 of the 25 novels were written and published in the second half of the century.

A second component of the UCSB Big Brot(her)s’ project involved data mining the books themselves, to extrapolate statistics on word choices and common phrases or topics that occurred in each. This portion of the research project proved to be slightly more difficult than the timeline. In order to datamine, the researchers had to obtain digital copies of the books, but this process was hindered as there was no budget to spend on e-book versions of the works. This problem was pseudo-legally solved by finding downloadable copies of each book in pdf, txt, or e-reader format. Although the books are not old enough to be considered public domain, many pirated copies are circulated on the internet. Since the researchers were not formally reading the books, they felt it prudent to download from said sources. Another issue the team encountered was the process of data mining itself: how were they going to do it? Once again, reading the books and recording by hand was impractical and inaccurate. For this part of the research, the team recruited the help of graduate student Elizabeth Shayne. Elizabeth introduced the students to a program entitled AntConc that would take any .txt file and analyze it with several different applications. Once the file was uploaded, features such as concordance, N-grams, and a list of the most common words that appear become available. Regrettably, the researchers had to prioritize finishing every component of their project, so they did not datamine every book. Each of the five students picked a book or short story to datamine. They analyzed both text files of the books, painstakingly compiling their reviews on Goodreads.com into a separate text file for analysis. But before any of this could take place, the digital versions of the books needed to be “cleaned up”. Most of the files the researchers found were originally in .pdf or .mobi format, and converting to .txt resulted in some odd formatting errors. In some books, page numbers as well as the title printed on each page were retained. Those had to be diligently deleted from the text file, lest they skew the data. Other problems include the fact that the AntConc software did not recognize hyphens or Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). These characters had to be manually searched for and replaced respectively by space bars and the number spelled out using the “find and replace” tool. This part of the project was probably the most mindlessly time-consuming.

Once the students finally cleaned their text files, they were able to analyze the documents using the AntConc software. The first thing checked was concordance. Students picked a couple of keywords they felt were relevant to the time period that the book was published, but were specific to the novel itself.. For example, for the novel We, one student chose “state,” “Welldoer” “Two Hundred Years War,” and “happy/happiness”. They noted those results and then cross-examined with results from the Goodreads reviews by running searches for terms pertinent to the conflict at the time of publication. “We,” a Russian novel, logically would have been inspired by the Russian Revolution, so searches of “USSR,” “Russia,” “Lenin,” and “Stalin,” were used. These searches led to pretty standard reviews in all cases, and only served to confirm the researcher’s hypotheses. The next function on AntConc the students used was the Word List. This program organized the text into a list of the most commonly used words. But because the English language requires heavy usage of certain words to retain grammatical accuracy, students found that many words appeared often in every book with no pertinence to the plot. Elizabeth Shayne supplied a file of many “junk” words that would only clutter data up; that list was uploaded to the Word List stop file, meaning they would be excluded from analysis. After using the stop list, students began to get interesting results. Words more pertinent to each novel’s themes and plots appeared. Generally speaking, the more a word is mentioned, the more significant it is to the storyline. For example, some notable most mentioned words in The Female Man, a feminist speculative fiction of five different dystopian universes written at the height of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, were “she,” “he,” “time,” “man,” and “woman.” From this alone the researchers could assume the novel explored the power of gender roles. They also ran the reviews for the novels under the wordlist application. The students felt that finding out which words most of the individual reviewers mentioned may show what kind of messages readers got from the novels in concurrence with real life events. Reviewers of The Female Man often mentioned “feminist,” “world,” “men,” and “women.” Readers were obviously very aware that the novel took a clear feminist stance.

The next AntConc tool the researchers utilized was the N-Grams function. This compiled a list of the most common phrases (the range of words of which was adjustable) that occurred. Researchers had to toy with this a bit, as the phrases both had to be uncommon enough to be relatable to dystopias in particular, and common enough that multiple occurrences of the same phrase was possible. In the end, most students found that a range of 2-5 word phrases worked best. This function is what researchers found to help tie the dystopian genre together. Many of the books had similar phrases in their results, such as “I don’t want,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t like.” This, to the researchers, fit in perfectly with the mentality of a resident in a Dystopia.

Aside from the AntConc software, the researchers also utilized a Topic Modeling Tool, a program that pulled out strings of words that were mentioned in close proximity to one another. These basically also helped the researchers determine the themes and subjects of the books. Topics from The Running Man included strings such as “row free lastrow thought hand vee mind give dollars knew white amelia didn held men filled elevator lot front hard network cold thousand god waiting,” and the reviews returned strings like “king games hunger action reality great schwarzenegger fast walk paced fan version year completely reader full free popular pollution premise early masses times slow introduction” While the strings for the reviews often returned a sort of summary of the plotline, it also helped the researchers tie in events that the readers felt the book was similar to, such as pollution.

The final portion of the UCSB Big Brot(her)’s research project was a bit of a creative interpretation of the data they obtained from the previous research. Taking the themes, major historical events, and datamined words from the corpus the students researched, they created a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The plan was to create branching plotlines that would accommodate as many themes from the research as possible. Researchers hoped that constructing their own Dystopia would give further insight into the genre as a whole. Utilizing an online platform named Quest, the group successfully wrote their CYOA novel. The program was simple, yet free-frame enough to allow the team creative freedom while requiring minimum coding experience. Because CYOA’s have large, branching storylines, a plot tree was created in order to roughly approximate the different routes a reader could take. These plotlines include several escape and rebellion based plots as well as some where the reader could simply resign themselves to their fate in the dystopian society. The basic premise was that the reader started off in a world ravaged by atomic warfare, where radiation and chemical waste polluted the environment making it difficult for human inhabitance. The only refuges were domed cities that filtered the air, named Hives. In order to preserve order in such confined quarters, the government enforced strict rules upon the inhabitants. Gender roles were heavily defined due to the astonishingly low fertility rate. The researchers felt they covered many of the themes of the novels they studied with this setting.

While it was heavily influenced by the most influential dystopian literatures of the 20th century, the CYOA also had to be original. The researchers did not want to just recreate a book that everyone had already read before. This required a good deal of creative writing as the students attempted to write in such a way as to simulate the tones and mood of famous works. They utilized the previous AntConc and topic modelling results, trying to include similar phrases and words. The students also incorporated sound clips and images to the finished product to add an extra dimension to the experience of living in a dystopian society. In the end, an unpolished, but fully playable game with over 10 endings and multiple paths was created. Writing the storylines gave the researchers an opportunity to explore the genre. During the writing, they found that dystopian literature was a very wide topic. Many common characteristics existed between dystopias, but the reasons for dystopia and how it is implemented is largely open ended. Making the creation a CYOA with music and pictures, rather than a novel, also changed the capabilities of the work. In bringing the reader directly into the story, it added a dimension of reality, as the main character was not a fictional being, but the reader themselves.

In choosing to research multiple facets of the dystopian genre, the research team at UCSB made an ambitious decision. With limited time and resources, the scope of the studies they conducted too had to be limited. If given more time and a budget, the team would have liked to add more detail to the timeline, perhaps adding specific events of the wars or social movements, rather than just have a blanket “WWII,” or “The Cold War.” It would also have been more enlightening to datamine all twenty five books, rather than the five chosen by the researchers, but took so long to prepare and analyze the data for one book that it just was not possible within the given time frame. The CYOA too would have been better presented given more time to find art and music.

Overall, the UCSB Big Brot(her)’s project was as insightful exploration of dystopian novels as a genre of creative fiction. By researching the timeline of events during the course of the writings of the works, the team was able to see what sort of events the writers and public were influenced by. It displayed the fears and worries of the population, as well as an idea of what people at the time thought the future may look like. Macroanalysis of the books through data mining showed what words and phrases could be associated with dystopian literature and how the authors went about creating a world with little political or social freedom. Finally, through the choose your own adventure, they put their knowledge into practical use by construction a dystopian society of their own.