Survival Instincts at the Heart of Dystopian Fiction

At twenty-four years old, I had my first encounter with apocalyptic devastation. It was Easter weekend, and I was working my first shift at an Old Navy. If someone had written the story of that weekend, it would have been a survival tale. Tilt the frame just a little, and it could have been dystopian. In the onslaught of faceless hordes wreaking havoc on our T-shirt tables, our meager staff had no chance. We couldn’t fold, restock, assist, or intervene fast enough to contain the full-scale attack of deal-seeking customers. The situation was completely out of control.

Why We Crave Survival Stories

Survival stories are all about narrowing choices and the loss of control. And the truth is, I will go to great lengths to maintain control.

That sounds terrible, I know. It’s not the kind of thing you admit at a dinner party. But I don’t need to control others—I only need to control what happens to me. Lack of control leaves me feeling restless, fighting the urge to get up and flee.

Stories that pin me down and force me to wrestle with utter loss of control make me squirm. I need to know that I can survive.

Women and Survival in Dystopian Fiction

I’m not talking about the “man fights to survive while being chased by a bear” story. As a woman and a mother, I prefer gritty female protagonists facing impossible odds. Place them in a bleak, dystopian survival story that removes them from the everyday, add magical powers or impossible technology, and my mind spins off, developing my own strategies for survival.

Recently, I was shaken when I finished Laney Katz Becker’s In the Family Way, looked at my beloved husband, and declared, “I don’t know if I would have survived that.”

Reproductive Freedom in Dystopian Literature

I consider myself tough. Aside from surviving the devastation of that Easter weekend, I’ve given birth to three children, run six marathons, and put in my time in cross-fit gyms. I’ve dug up trees and laid sod. Once, as part of the odd rituals of teenage courtship, I carried a man fourteen inches taller than me up a flight of stairs on my back. I’m resilient, strong, and resourceful. In short, if there were an apocalypse, I like my chances. But Becker’s book shook me.
Ironically, Becker’s story isn’t dystopian. It’s set in an Ohio suburb in the mid-1960s, but like so many dystopian stories about women, it’s about choices and control—specifically, control over financial and reproductive freedom. Stripped of political power, physical strength, freedom, and choice—the essential ingredients of any good dystopian tale—these women grapple with how to survive.

Becker’s book haunted me. The characters couldn’t secure a mortgage, get a credit card, buy a home, or even rent an apartment. They had little control over their own reproductive freedom. Those rights wouldn’t come until nearly a decade later. The novel instantly put me in mind of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. What could be more dystopic than being cut off from your money, rounded up at the border of your own country, and forced into unwanted pregnancies? One could argue that Atwood’s Gilead looked an awful lot like Becker’s Ohio.

Motherhood and the Pressure of Survival

In interviews, Margaret Atwood has said she lifted her premise straight from the Old Testament story of Sarah, Abraham, and Sarah’s servant, Hagar. Laney Katz Becker didn’t have to reach so far back. My mother was a teenager in the mid-1960s. Based on her stories of growing up, Becker’s depiction of women and their choices rings true. Often, dystopian fiction isn’t exploring a possible future so much as commenting on the present—or the past. With today’s ongoing debates over reproductive freedom, the ramifications of returning to the politics of that era are chilling.
Another book set in the same period is Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons, where millions of women around the world spontaneously transform into dragons in 1955. Some devour their husbands, bosses, and neighbors. Some remain, redefining what it means to be mothers and community members. Others fly to the moon and disappear.

I’m certain my grandmother would have found the story fascinating. In 1955, she was the mother of three. Married to a poor farmer, she pursued a master’s degree and worked full-time as a teacher to keep her family from sliding into poverty. While she was ahead of her time in many ways, her choices were still limited. I’m sure there were moments when she would have gladly burned it all down—except for one fact: she loved her children.

Children complicate the question of survival, especially for women. Carrying a child in your body makes you vulnerable. Caring for a human who cannot care for themselves makes you vulnerable. For better or worse, women are synonymous with childbirth and child-rearing. They are less likely to be lone-wolf survivors and more likely to be interwoven in community, family, and motherhood. Because of this interconnection and inherent vulnerability, dystopian fiction about women and children narrows the choices available to a single character and ratchets up the survival pressure.

“Karma Birds”: A New Dystopian Survival Story

No doubt, these themes were rattling around in my subconscious when I wrote “Karma Birds,” published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 41.

In “Karma Birds,” seventeen-year-old Claire is thrust into the role of caregiver for her two younger sisters after an unpredictable plague of eldritch monsters. The girls are part of a caravan traveling through a ruined landscape, struggling to reach safety. Their survival rests solely on Claire.

As a mother, nothing terrifies me more than imagining one of my children—especially one of my daughters—having to survive alone under terrible circumstances. That Claire is on the cusp of womanhood is no accident: my oldest daughter is seventeen.

“Karma Birds” was born, in part, from a dream I had during Covid. As a culture, we were fighting over masks, vaccinations, and lockdowns. In my real, everyday life, I was asking what choices were available to me, how much control I had, and how we would survive.

Dystopian Stories as Real-Life Training Modules

Now I’m parenting children in a post-pandemic world caught in cultural upheaval, global wars, and a technological revolution. The pressures we face and the choices available to us are constantly shifting. I don’t know anyone who isn’t grappling with a loss of control. Real life, it seems, is constantly ratcheting up the tension.

Dystopian survival stories feel like training modules. Would you rebel against your government? Turn on your neighbor? Withhold aid—or offer it? In “Karma Birds,” what Claire doesn’t choose is just as important as what she does. The same is true in real life. What am I capable of in the face of narrowing choices and loss of control? I’d like to think I’d take the high road, choose kindness, follow the law. But the truth is, we never know until we’re staring down the proverbial barrel.

Perhaps that’s why dystopian tales are so disturbing. Like that weekend at Old Navy, tilt the frame just a little, and they feel uncomfortably possible.