Dystopia in fiction isn’t new— many books such as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the anti-Christian hate novel The Handmaid’s Tale are all dystopian.
What is dystopia? The ‘dys’ element comes from the Greek, meaning ‘painful.’ So dystopia is about a painful place. In dystopian fiction, the pain comes in part from a totalitarian government. There can also be pain caused by nature— in the hate novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ there is an infertility plague. Other possible natural problems your characters might confront are things like meteor strikes, global cooling/warming, a volcano sprouting in a bad location, and other natural disasters.
‘Dystopian’ as a genre/subgenre name is a more recent thing. Usually these ‘dystopians’ are YA books, meaning books for teenage children. I suppose dystopian sells better than ‘science fiction,’ which would be a common genre for such books since they are usually set in the future.
Dystopia is usually considered the opposite of Utopia. Utopia was a book by Thomas More about an ideal government. The government in More’s day was King Henry VIII of England. Henry was Thomas More’s friend, he made More Chancellor— and then had More beheaded for dissenting from Henry’s plan to rebel against the Church in order to divorce his wife and marry a mistress. Well, Thomas More did get a sainthood out of it.
Since a utopia-type scheme usually has a top-down big government, just to simplify things, one might say any utopia has dystopian elements, at least if you are not the king. It’s good to be the king.
The lead character in a dystopian novel is never the king. Usually it is a common subject, who experiences the dystopia as an ordinary subject without power. For purposes of having a novel, your protagonist will experience the dark side of the dystopia. Katniss in the Hunger Games had to volunteer for the Games to protect a younger sister. She didn’t just watch the Games on television. She was right in the thick of the blood and violence.
Dystopias are often an exaggeration of the negative things in our society— perhaps a warning of the ‘if this goes on’ nature. For example, take the overreach by government schools (public schools) in the United States. Some schools demand children buy the school lunches and not bring lunches from home— even if the family wants their kids on a healthy Paleo eating plan, or a vegan diet. Some schools have ‘transgender closets’ so that kids can use breast binders and opposite-sex clothes without letting parents know. Other schools have allowed teachers to demand students write the word ‘Jesus’ on a piece of paper, and throw the paper on the floor and stomp on it.
A dystopia based on this could have schools that could override parents on anything— perhaps pick random kids to be denied the chance to learn to read, and just trained to work the most menial of jobs. Perhaps schools could train the kids to memorize the talking points of the dystopian government, and report on parents that expressed dissent so the parents could be properly jailed. Or perhaps the government schools could routinely grab teenage children off to work in factories in distant cities part time, to diminish family connections and get cheap labor.
Or you could have a dystopia based on the idea that the eliminate-police radicals got their way, and just going down the street to the grocery store meant having to fight off criminals.
But you can’t let your dystopia get too preachy. There has to be a good story in there. The flaw of The Handmaid’s Tale, besides the absurdly ignorant straw-man version of Christianity, was that the author was so busy preaching her pro-abortion feminism message she didn’t once think of how that message would seem to those threatened by an infertility plague. More abortion doesn’t exactly help that situation! (Now, I’m not saying The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t well written or that I didn’t once enjoy reading it repeatedly— but it does have its flaws and its hate.)
If you are writing dystopia, remember that the dystopia is just the setting. The villains/antagonists are likely agents of the dystopia in some way, but the story is about the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist(s.) What does your protagonist want? What is his goal? That’s your story. Many aspects of your dystopia are just a bit of local color along the journey through the story.
What is your favorite dystopian novel, or novel with dystopian elements? What did you like about it? Have you ever written a dystopian story yourself?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Follow Nissa Annakindt on social media:
Gab (free speech alternative): https://gab.com/nissalovescats
MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/nissaannakindt
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nissa.amas.katoj
Facebook Trad Marriage page: https://www.facebook.com/defendtradmarriage/
My very new Substack newsletter: https://nissaannakindt.substack.com
Keto Blog: https://annakindt.wordpress.com
My Antimatter Life 
Great description of the basic dystopian novel. Yes. I have written a dystopian novel set in the America of next week–at the rate things are going. The Shrinking Zone is an excitng ride through our near future dystopia. I call it a fanfare for the common man.