For some reasons, there are relatively few depictions of religious dystopias. For that matter, many depict alternate worlds where Counter-Reformation Catholicism was triumphant. Fundamentalist Protestantism seems to have largely escaped.

As I noted earlier in this blog, while reviewing Stephen Fry’s Making History (1995), Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1986) is the sole current exception to the above, set in a totalitarian future theocratic United States, renamed the Republic of Gilead, where women are slave chattels, concubinage is legal for the elite due to mass infertility, and lesbians and gay men are executed as ‘gender traitors.’

Nevertheless, alternate world SF seems to be the mainstay of religious dystopias, all set in alternate Britains, all of whom are ruled by technologically regressive Counter-Reformation Catholic regimes. Keith Robert’s Pavane (1968) follows several generations of one family until international revolution breaks out against the Papacy, and is set in a world where Elizabeth I was assassinated in 1588 and the Spanish Armada successfully conquered England as a result. Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration (1976) centres on hapless young musical prodigy Hubert Anvil, and is set in a world where an all-powerful Catholic Church wants to preserve his soprano voice through “alteration” (castration). Here, Henry VII’s elder son, Arthur Tudor, survived long enough to impregnate Katherine of Aragon with Stephen II, a surviving son. Henry VIII tried to usurp the throne in 1509, but the church called a “War of the English Succession” to stop him, and Martin Luther wasn’t alienated from a far more pragmatic church. In this world, the Machiavellean Pope John XXIV has absolute authority, even triggering a European-Ottoman War, and dabbling in bacteriological warfare against his peasantry due to population excess. Finally, John Whitbourn depicts a similarly machiavellean cleric in A Dangerous Energy (1993), set in a world where Elizabeth I died of smallpox in 1562, and her feckless cousin Mary Queen of Scots insured long-term Catholic ascendancy.

For some reason, there appears to be no science fiction set in extrapolations of Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s Britain, or Howard’s Australia. In our own case, the Muldoon era ended over a quarter century ago, although C.K. Stead’s Smith’s Dream (1976) and Craig Harrison’s Broken October (1976) depict what two contemporary authors thought about Muldoon’s authoritarian ascendancy and its effect on human rights, civil liberties and Maori demands for reparation as they reasserted traditional calls for return of ancestral lands and cultural preservation in the seventies.  Janet Frame’s Intensive Care (1970) is the only other New Zealand-based dystopia of merit, and takes quite a different focus. In the final third of the book, innocent intellectually disabled poet Milly Galbraith is unaware that post-apocalyptic New Zealand has passed a Human Delineation Act that creates the grounds for eugenic ‘disability cleansing’ to be carried out. Her impending tragedy is skilfully evoked in this masterpiece, which some local film director of merit should film at some point in the intermediate future.  Although the latter has no gay characters, Frame’s focus on the violent erasure of difference renders this relevant for us.

In contemporary New Zealand, it’s difficult to extrapolate an authoritarian future. Our sole neofascist sect, the National Democrats, is tiny and restricted to the Kapiti Coast and troglodyte houses in Christchurch. As for the Christian Right, it’s too weak to bother anyone except vigilant watchdogs determined to see that it never has a chance to become a serious threat to human rights, civil liberties and democratic pluralism as it has within the United States.  Despite leftist fury against the New Right of the eighties and nineties, most objections took the form of sober factual political analysis- and no dystopian fiction was written that extrapolated the continuous survival of growing economic inequality and social exclusion. 

As for a New Zealand-based antigay future dystopia, it is difficult to see how one could be credibly constructed, given that it may be possible to remedy outstanding issues like inclusive adoption reform, the abolition of the defence of provocation from the Crimes Act and same-sex marriage proper in the intermediate future. Thankfully, it has become impossible to contemplate. In fact, apart from the examples from the seventies Muldoon era cited above (and Frame’s work), there aren’t any other extrapolations of what a future dystopian New Zealand society would be like, or how it would arise.  Perhaps green SF authors or others could remedy that, given the overwhelming significance of climate change and its cultural consequences…?