McCarthy had bullied the Army into removing some "tainted" books from the overseas libraries Meanwhile our search for a magazine publisher to print portions of Fahrenheit 451 came to a dead end. No one wanted to take a chance on a novel about past, present of future censorship. .
Fahrenheit 451 is a clear reaction to the McCarthy era in which it was written; the near future book burning society is a logical projection of the world of 1950's middle class America.
A key theme of dystopia has always been oppression and rebellion. The oppressors are almost always much more powerful than the rebels. Consequently, dystopian tales often become studies in survival. In Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984) it is simply a question of staying alive; in Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1936) it is a question of staying human. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949) it becomes a matter of preserving individuality in the face of thought control. The hero (there are very few female heroines in traditional dystopian fiction) often faces utter defeat or at most a Pyrrhic victory, a significant feature of dystopian tales.
This lack of female protagonists needs to be explored more closely. Feminist utopias/dystopias seem to form a distinct sub-genre of their own, mainly due to the reason that is near impossible to make a protagonist female without bringing with it the implication of a feminist agenda. The energy that went into such feminist utopias as Joanna Russ" The Female Man (1975) and Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground (1980) also inspired their opposite, the feminist anti-utopia or dystopia. In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) women are enslaved to men, either as decorative spouses or as simple breeding machines. The feminist dystopia, like in general, takes the form of an intensification and projection of currently existing patterns; hence the feminist utopia will often contain an explicit anti-utopia to highlight the present position of women.
