Speculative fiction is important to the field of surveillance studies not only because surveillance is a major theme in these literary texts but also because their formal properties provide us with the language, imagery, and feelings associated with being under surveillance. These texts can therefore be utilised by sociologists and other researchers beyond the arts and humanities. As speculative literary genres concerned with world-building, utopian and dystopian fiction have inherent sociological concerns. This is, in my view, misguided because dystopian fiction, like utopian fiction, diagnoses issues with the present, inspires activism and resistance, and, in the twenty-first century, often presents ideas of how to effect positive change through collective activism. Utopian theorists often speak about the merits of reading utopian fiction in order to reimagine and rebuild a better world, but dystopian fiction is often overlooked.
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