While everyone is fussing about the Apocalypse or Doomsday about to happen (as they say) this December 21, I couldn't just literally hate the idea of it all. Why? Simply because if these false prophecies didn't exist, I couldn't imagine how my reading life would be without dystopian novels. From YA best-selling novels The Hunger Games, Julianna Baggott's The Pure, Shatter Me, Matched and The Giver, all fall under the same setting, dystopia.
But what is dystopia in the first place? Dystopia, or the word itself, literally came from two Ancient Greek words: δυσ-, "bad, hard", and τόπος, "place, landscape". According to Wikipedia, "it can alternatively be called cacotopia or anti-utopia." It is the counterpart of utopia, wherein instead of the community being built into a desirable atmosphere, the dystopia is a community or society that is built in an undesirable and frightening setting.
The term was originally coined by Thomas More in the book he wrote in 1516. The first known use of the word itself, recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, was during the speech given by John Stuart Mill in the year 1968 as he described the Irish government land policy:
