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The question that stuck out to me immediately was #3, “What role does technology play in shaping the dystopian society?”
Beginning with “The Machine Stops” by E M Forster, technology is the glue that the fragments of society are clinging to for dear life. It is how people get dressed, It is how people eat. How they breathe. It is how people communicate, how people “experience”, it is who they pray to. It is the teat. It is also the pacifier to soften the blow that natural life has already ceased years ago, as far as people know. The surface world and atmosphere were destroyed over time by man, so civilization was moved beneath the surface in order to sustain life. In the end, people became so naturally oblivious to life as a society that when the Machine stopped working, people are left completely helpless to die amidst the chaos.

There is a very similar tone, that of technology enhancing life as well as decimating it in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”. The setting is of a seemingly average home where once again the day to day wants and needs of the individual are brought right to you. Tell the home what you would like for breakfast, what music you would like to hear, a poem perhaps. It tells the family when to come and go, but no one ever comes or goes. On the side of the house, are the silhouettes of the family’s last moments before they were vaporized by an atomic bomb. Living on only as the white figures within the charred exterior siding of the house. Technology was so advanced and so routine that it continued the daily tasks of each individual household long after the household was gone.

Lastly, in “From Beyond” by H P Lovecraft, technology plays a huge role in the story of a machine designed to bring pleasure and knowledge beyond the comprehension of the senses shows us too much and drives the user mad. The machine seems to allow passage to a dimension closely resembling ours where all matter is intertwined with jellyfish like creatures and tentacles. Kind of hard to explain but that is the best that I can put it. The important part is that the story again suggests that understanding the limitations of our usage of technology and respecting that is paramount in remaining symbiotic with it.