How We Write Dystopia

Have you read parable of the sower?? It’s incredible realistic dystopian novel following how society actually seems to be playing out. Instead of an authoritarian government the ruin is due to capitalism’s natural conclusion.

I like your observation regarding commonalities between dystopian novels, but in the end your analysis feels a bit too much like the online left's classic "why don't they talk about capitalism?". That's a fair question, but in this context it's a bit uncharitable to the authors. Somewhat superficially, I don't think Atwood warning against making women into baby factories and Orwell thinking that people getting disappeared to general indifference is bad is an indication that they have accepted individual freedom as "unassailable". More to the point, these works confront the fact that industrial society, capitalist or otherwise, requires some degree of uniformity to function. Neatly organized communities whose way of life can be more easily administred. Forms that can be turned into statistics. The incentive for the state is to always demand more uniformity, and this is something to be vigilant about in any economic system. It is not just the "liberal subject" who is crushed by the state. Quite the contrary. The people who now support status quo liberalism in Western countries likely would have little trouble conforming to the demands of a more invasive state in exchange for greater material comfort. Rather, the victims of state power, of villagization, of resettlement, of forced language assimilation, of displacement in favor of state megaprojects, etc. are typically found at the ethnic, cultural and geographic periphery: they are nomads, vagrants, marginals, indigenous and colonized "for their own good".

Thinking of unconventional dystopias, Glasshouse (the 2006 novel) came to my mind. It wears a handful of hats, but the dystopic one is about fashioning a hell from comparatively minor incentives, and the impulse to (make others) conform

There's another subgenre of dystopia that has had a very interesting evolution: Cyberpunk. (Later: Somehow the new app ate the rest of my comment) Cyberpunk started as a vision of a dystopian capitalist future, where the main worry is not the government controlling the citizens but the government being so weak it can't defend its citizens against much more powerful entities — corporations. But then the Silicon Valley tech bros got into it, loved the aesthetics and even more the fact that it wouldn't be a dystopia for the ruling class (them) and, without changing the setting at all, it became an utopian setting. By Ready Player One, everyone lives in the slums but it's cool because a corporation controls all entertainment! So not all dystopias are like you said, but capitalism will co-opt all of them, either to stop alternatives ("Free healthcare is like 1984!") or to promote itself ("Having corps control everything will take us to Mars!").

I think that’s a fair critique. I also think a lot of dystopias feel like they’re about a governmental upper class that oppresses the middle class. This is explicit in 1984 where the common “proles” are presented as unlikely to ever rebel in their own so long as thinkers like Winston are repressed.