I’ve always gelled with dystopian fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, George Orwell's 1984, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, even Lewis Carroll's rendering of 'Wonderland', have all hit a chord with me that resonates many years beyond the moment of reading.

I’ve gobbled up big and miniscreen adaptations with gleeful enjoyment bordering on the obsessive from The Handmaid’s Tale to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Veronica Roth’s Divergent. I’m mid-way (and miles behind the cultural curve) through The Hunger Games films based on Suzanne Collins’ novel trilogy.

Katniss Everdeen’s trials have got me thinking about the role of dystopian fiction. On a grey summer’s evening, tired from a long run and staving off a cold, it was the prospect of entering an alternative, alarming, version of life that stopped me trawling any further through Netflix. Sitting alone, I found company with the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

What makes us reach for these unattractive worlds? Where ideas are taken to illogical extremes, where agency is removed, where the human body is commodified and even brutally mutilated, where natural forces and environments are violent and inhospitable. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Atwood hits the nail on the head (well she would) by talking in broader terms of ‘speculative fiction’, which she views as having routes in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It’s an interesting word to choose, by entering a dystopia we’re both conjecturing and investing, considering a vision of a future and trying ideas on for size, with the bonus of it being an intellectual rather than financial exercise that costs us nothing.

The term utopia was first coined by the Tudor statesman Thomas More in his 1516 work of the same name. It took over 230 years for its antonym, if that’s what a dystopia truly is, to arrive in our vocabulary within Lewis Henry Younge's Utopia: or Apollo's Golden Days as ‘dustopia’ (literally ‘bad place’) vying with ‘cacotopia’ during 19th century political discourse.

A dystopia serves as an obvious and useful conceptual means to critique social constructs but in fiction it’s impossible not to become invested in character. The role of the individual within the system, where they sit on the submission-rebellion spectrum, the bonds formed or dissolved with others in the face of destructive or controlling elements, carry us through dystopian works.

It all comes back to the building blocks of storytelling, expectation versus actuality, conflict and the opportunity for resolution, struggle and our ability – or not – to overcome it. If all storytelling allows us to disseminate information effectively, dystopian fiction does it by means of stark, harsh realities which we can enter, absorb and promptly abandon. Learning by means of plunge pool.

There is a sense of relief on exit. Life is not as bad as what we’ve been witnessing – either in our reader’s minds eye or on the screen – and it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact we step back from dystopia feeling like we’re inhabiting a better place. It’s ultimately a form of feel-good fiction, just in curious and compelling reverse, a punishing workout in pursuit of a dopamine effect that is both additive and addictive.