The dystopia craze is (hopefully) starting to pass. The Fifth Wave bombed horribly at the box office, the Hunger Games movies are finally completed, and dystopian literature is generally being relegated to the middle school.

However, one aftershock of the craze has still RUINED SCI-FI FOREVER. In a futile attempt to get people interested in love triangles and archery into science fiction in general, publishing houses have started nonsensically slapping the “dystopian” label onto any sort of speculative fiction. Random House has a “Dystopian Universe” poster that exemplifies this trend- they list works such as World War Z, The Stand, and I am Legend as “dystopian.”

For God’s sake, the poster says that The Stand gave “dystopian fiction the core idea of a worldwide apocalypse.” Post-apocalyptic fiction isn’t dystopian, because there is no society there to criticize.

A dystopia is not a society that’s different from a 2016 American Idealistic Civilization. A dystopia is, depending on how anal you are, a way of showing how various theoretical societies would fail horribly, or it’s simply a society where things are pretty awful, often via surveillance or ugly surroundings.

It’s fine to like dystopian fiction, but for the love of God, don’t start slapping the label onto anything that’s not American society. If you want to get people reading a book, talk about it on its own merits. Otherwise, you’ll just be seen as a font of lies and bad taste, as well as making nerds idiots who take words on paper being labeled wrong too seriously.