The Dark Tower

A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian. Examples of dystopias are... characterized in books such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other examples include The Iron Heel, described by Erich Fromm as "the earliest of the modern Dystopian", and the religious dystopia of The Handmaid's Tale. Dystopian societies feature different kinds of repressive social control systems, and various forms of active and passive coercion. Ideas and works about dystopian societies often explore the concept of humans abusing technology and humans individually and collectively coping, or not being able to properly cope with technology that has progressed far more rapidly than humanity's spiritual evolution. Dystopian societies are often imagined as police states, with unlimited power over the citizens. The word derives from Greek: δυσ-, "bad, hard", and Greek: τόπος, "place, landscape". It can alternatively be called cacotopia, or anti-utopia. The word dystopia represents a counterpart of utopia, a term originally coined by Thomas More in his book of that title completed in 1516.
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