Ursula nails it
I commented once (at least) that there are certain sf tropes that literary types are allowed to do, and it's quite okay to be dystopic or apocalyptic, providing you at no point introduce a spaceship or a talking squid. Plus, the mood should be, on the whole, grim.
(Naomi Mitchison of course completely ignored any such strictures and had spaceships and aliens - though I don't think any of the latter were squidiform - in Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and in Solution Three something apocalyptic or nearly so has happened, and civilisation is being carefully and caringly rebuilt, rather than a brutal Hobbesian state of nature pertaining. But she was pretty much sui generis.)
Ursula Le Guin takes a very large codfish to the dystopia trope:
Dystopia is by its nature a dreary, inhospitable country. To its early explorers it held all the excitement of discovery, and that made their descriptions fresh and powerful - EM Forster's "The Machine Stops", Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But for the last 30 years or more, Dystopia has been a major tourist attraction. Everybody goes there and writes a book about it. And the books tend to be alike, because the terrain is limited and its nature is monotonous.
She nails the repetitious setup of what dystopia looks like:
human hives, controlled by government and supporting a regimented, sheltered, safe, highly unnatural, often luxurious, "utopian" lifestyle. Those inside the enclaves consider those living outside them to be primitive, lawless and dangerous, which they are, though they also often hold the promise of freedom. So Dystopia has a hero: an insider who goes outside.
Oh dear yes.
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