Dystopia

Dystopia is a word generally used to refer to a narrow genre of fiction about negative futures.

Etymology

The word is a play on Thomas Moore's Utopia, literally, "No Where," a Greek neologism, referring to an ideal future. The word "dystopia" was first used by John Stuart Mill in a speech given before the British House of Commons in 1868, in which Mill denounced the government's Irish land policy: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."