Storming the fortress

Our world suffers from extreme inequality. The richest 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half holds only 2%.¹ The world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity – more than four billion people. Elon Musk has more than half a trillion dollars while 1 in four people globally struggle for food.²

We live in a world with a stark and growing divide between the haves and the have-nots, and life feels very different on either side of the fence. For the rich, wealth buys power, privilege and luxuries that past monarchs could only have dreamt of. For the rest, life is a daily struggle to survive. The Earth’s resources are funnelled to the few, leaving the vast majority to live desperate lives.

In my last two posts, I have written about imagined dystopias. Why do we need to imagine dystopias when we already live in one?

One reason is that the cold, hard statistics that reveal global injustice feel unreal – mere numbers that are difficult to make sense of. We humans are rarely moved by numbers. We respond to stories. One of the most common genres of dystopian story depicts an unjust world taken to the extreme: the fortress world.

Fortress worlds

I first came across the term ‘fortress world’ in 2002, when the futurists at the Great Transition Initiative released their groundbreaking set of scenarios depicting possible global futures. They imagined six different paths into the future – two ‘conventional worlds’ that felt like continuations of the present, two visions for transition to a better world, and two dystopian visions.

One of the dystopian scenarios was a terrifying Breakdown narrative, where environmental and social crises spiral out of control, conflict spreads, and institutions disintegrate. This is the kind of dystopian future I explored in my previous post on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The other was a Fortress World narrative, described as follows.

The separate spheres of the haves and have-nots, the included and excluded, are codified in asymmetrical and authoritarian legal and institutional frameworks. The affluent live in protected enclaves in rich nations and in strongholds in poor nations—bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery. In the police state outside the fortress, the majority is mired in poverty and denied basic freedoms. The authorities use high-tech surveillance and old-fashioned brutality to control social unrest and migration, and to protect valued environmental resources. The elite have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management and uneasy stability.³

Written in 2002, this sounds eerily like a description of the world we live in today, 24 years later.

The idea of the fortress world has influenced other futures thinking. In their work on the future of cities, the UK Government Office for Science included a Fortress City scenario, summarised in the image below.⁴ The image highlights the possibility of ‘wars for resources’. As I write, war is raging in Iran and oil and gas tankers are prevented from navigating the Strait of Hormuz.

These scenarios are helpful attempts to go beyond cold numbers and imagine futures where inequality continues to grow, but most will be unaware of their existence, buried in government reports and little known websites. This is where popular fiction can play a crucial role in reaching beyond the statistics of inequality to engage the emotions of a much wider audience. There is a rich stream of dystopian fiction that has done just that, exploring unequal worlds in all their ugly detail.

The Hunger Games

There are many works of fiction I could focus on but I will use The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as an example because of its popularity across fiction and film adaptations. The Hunger Games series has sold more than 100 million copies globally and the film series grossed more than $3.3 billion. Compare this to The Road, discussed in my previous post, which was critically acclaimed but has sold more like 1.5 million copies and grossed $27 million at the box office. This reach gives The Hunger Games far greater influence over the way we collectively imagine dystopian futures.

The Hunger Games depicts an archetypal fortress world. The protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, a poor coal-mining district enclosed in barbed wire and subject to the whims of the powerful that live in the far-off Capitol.

Collins situates her narrative in a future North America, where the new country of Panem arose after ‘the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained’. (Arguably, this makes The Hunger Games a work of climate fiction, although there is little reference to climate change beyond this one). Panem comprised the shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts but the districts rose up against the Capitol during the Dark Days and the thirteenth district was ‘obliterated’.

As punishment for the uprising, the Capitol forces each of the twelve remaining districts to provide a girl and boy as Tributes to participate in the annual Hunger Games. This brutal entertainment for the wealthy elites in the Capitol places the 24 Tributes in an outdoor arena and forces them to fight to the death. Failure to comply is brutally punished, maintaining the hold of the fortified Capitol over those outside.

This exposition is dealt with quickly at the start of the novel, with most of the first book devoted to the 74th Hunger Games, where Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta Mellark represent District 12.

The hero’s journey

In an unequal fortress world, hope often takes the form of a hero arising who can upset the status quo and create an opportunity for transformation. In The Hunger Games, Katniss unwillingly plays this role. Her story in the first book is in many ways a typical hero’s journey, as defined in Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell theorised that mythological narratives frequently followed an archetypal structure with 12 stages, which he called the ‘hero’s adventure’ and summarised as:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell’s theory has been criticised for its vagueness, for cherry picking from myths to suit its structure, for Eurocentricism and patriarchy, and for contributing to a homogenisation of popular narratives. Yet it has been incredibly influential. We can illustrate the 12 stages of the hero’s journey using Katniss’ story in The Hunger Games.

I. The Departure

This phase deals with the hero leaving their ‘ordinary world’ and venturing into the unknown.

• The Ordinary World: Katniss lives in District 12, a literal “grey” world of poverty and survival. Her life is defined by hunting illegally to feed her family after the death of her father in a mining accident and her mother’s withdrawal.
• The Call to Adventure: The Reaping (the event where Tributes are chosen). While Katniss isn’t chosen, the “call” occurs when her little sister Prim’s name is drawn.
• Refusal of the Call: In Campbell’s monomyth the hero initially refuses the call to adventure. In a deviation from Campbell’s theory, Katniss doesn’t hesitate; she immediately volunteers to save her sister, showing her “heroic” nature from the start.
• Meeting the Mentor: Katniss meets Haymitch Abernathy, the only previous victor of the Hunger Games from District 12. Though he is a reluctant, drunken mentor, he holds the essential knowledge she needs to survive the Arena.
• Crossing the First Threshold: Leaving District 12 on the high-speed train to the Capitol. This is the point of no return where the rules of her world completely change.

II. The Initiation

The hero must face trials, find allies, and eventually confront their greatest fear.

• Tests, Allies, and Enemies:
  • Tests: Katniss is put through training sessions and interviews where she needs to catch the attention of the Capitol if she is to attract sponsors that can help her in the Arena.
  • Allies: Peeta slowly becomes an ally although the story is complicated. Katniss’ stylist Cinna is an early ally and she finds others in the Arena.
  • Enemies: Some of the Tributes from the Districts closer to the Capitol are known as “Careers” and train for their moment in the Games. The Capitol itself is also an enemy.
• Approach to the Inmost Cave: This is the literal entry into the Arena. The tension builds as Katniss stands on her pedestal, waiting for the countdown to end.
• The Ordeal: The Games is one long ordeal of hunger, violence, loss and despair. Katniss finds an ally in Rue, a young girl from District 11. Her most profound “death and rebirth” moment occurs when Rue dies. This transforms Katniss from a mere survivor into a rebel who mourns openly, defying the Capitol’s intent.
• The Reward: Normally, the Games allows only one survivor. Whether faked or real, the apparent love between Katniss and Peeta catches the imagination of the Capitol and the Gamemakers reward them by declaring that two Tributes from the same District can both survive.

III. The Return

The hero must find a way to bring the “boon” or the lesson back to the ordinary world.

• The Road Back: When only Katniss and Peeta remain, the Gamemakers change the rules back, saying only one can win. Katniss and Peeta refuse to kill each other and prepare to eat poisonous berries rather than satisfy the Capitol. Katniss is sure the Gamemakers will not allow this as it would leave no victor.
• The Resurrection: Katniss is proven right – the Capitol caves in and allows them both to live. Katniss is “reborn” not just as a victor, but as a symbol of resistance (the Mockingjay). She survives the games, but the stakes are now higher.
• Return with the Elixir: Katniss returns to District 12. However, the “elixir” she brings back isn’t just safety—it’s the spark of hope and the beginning of a revolution that will eventually transform her entire society in the books to come.

Why we need more

Dystopian fortress worlds take inequality to an extreme where the audience cannot fail to be moved by the injustice. The rise of a hero to storm the fortress makes for compelling and satisfying storytelling. We, the audience, feel connected with the protagonist and cheer on their inevitable victory. Rebellion is possible, empires fall and right will prevail.

But as we put down the book or leave the cinema, we walk back out into a real fortress world that is not so easily stormed. The worlds depicted in these stories are simplistic, just as Campbell’s theory is simplistic. Our interconnected world is far too complex to be changed by a single hero and the villains are far less obvious. Real transformation requires sustained heroic effort by millions, building movements, speaking truth to power and co-creating an imaginary of a better world. It requires a lot of the kind of work that would be too boring for a popular narrative.

Further, fortress world stories typically end with the overthrow of the unjust regime and don’t linger to explore how our heroes engage in the painstaking work of rebuilding society. In the real world, we can’t just roll the credits. We need to imagine what comes next, once the fortress falls.

In future posts, I will be exploring narratives that engage with the messy reality of transforming society and the difficult task of imagining a future society in which all are able to thrive equally. But in the next few posts, I want to share a bit more about the tagline for this project – regenerating imagination, imagining regeneration. What do these terms mean and why do I think they are so important for our future?

Notes

1. World Inequality Report 2026, https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/ ↩︎
2. Oxfam International, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/resisting-rule-rich ↩︎
3. Raskin et al., 2002, Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, https://www.greattransition.org/gt-essay ↩︎
4. UK Government Office of Science, 2014, Future of Cities: Living in the City, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/future-cities-living-in-the-city. ↩︎