The Future-as-past in Dystopian Fiction

Twentieth century dystopian fictions such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) strongly adhere to a generic convention by which they project forwards into a narrated future in order to look back critically towards the present. In the course of this focus on the past, such dystopias include slivers of contested and incomplete accounts of how the dystopian state came to exist. I term these fragmentary narratives future histories. Such accounts exist within a timeframe that runs from the authorial present to the point in the future at which the main narrative is set. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, this period covers the years from 1949 (the publication date) to 1984, in which the main story occurs. I term the timeframe between the authorial present and the future temporal setting of the main story world the future-as-past. This article explores the development of the complex temporality of dystopian fiction from the early to mid-twentieth century. Discussion focuses on the manner in which the fragmented future-as-past is employed critically in relation to the story world and to historical reality. The article concludes that by providing scattered hints from which further information could be deduced or inferred, often but not always with the help of contextual knowledge, this temporal narrative strategy invites the reader to actively participate and politically engage in the reconstruction of future histories. Such future histories can never be completed or fully mapped as dystopian fictions are usually less specifically predictive than they at first appear. Keywords temporality, genre, political fiction, the state, the reade

Mid Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought

This thesis examines political and social thought in dystopian fiction of the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on works by four authors: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and John Wyndham’s postwar novels (especially The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Chrysalids (1955)). The central concern of this thesis is how political and social ideas are developed within a literary mode which evolved as response to both literary concerns and political ideas, including on the one hand literary utopias, science fiction, satire, and literary modernism; and on the other hand modernity, social Darwinism, apocalypse, war, and changes in gender roles in the broader culture. It is argued that the narrative structures of these novels are crucial in enabling them to perform such critical tasks. These texts use fictionality to enact self-reflexive critiques of the disasters of their age that both acknowledge their own emergence from the post-Enlightenment tradition in the history of political ideas, and criticise the failings of this very tradition of which they are part. The work of a variety of critical theorists, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt and Raymond Williams inform this analysis. This thesis aims to demonstrate how comparative readings of critical theory and literature can reveal their mutually interactive significance as cultural reactions to historical events. Dystopian fictions of the mid-twentieth century are both important documents in cultural history, and valuable literary examples of the development and diffusion of a plurality of modernisms within popular fiction

Providing frequency droop control using variable speed wind turbines with augmented control

An augmentation to conventional wind turbine control is presented and its applicability for providing droop control services to the grid is investigated. Both the impact on the fatigue loads of the turbines and the change in energy capture when providing droop control are assessed. Three alternative strategies for providing droop control are simulated. The controller is found to be suitable for providing droop control. When providing droop control, the damage equivalent loads for the tower and for the blades change by between -0.63% and 0.14% and between -0.45% and 0.29% respectively. Energy capture is reduced by between 3.18% and 10.91% compared to normal operation, depending upon the strategy chosen to supply droop control, the wind turbine used and the wind speed distribution

Migration and the Dystopian Imagination of European Border Regimes

Inward migration has long troubled the European political imagination. For example, an emphasis on fortification and low immigration was key to the civilisational fantasy of many early modern European literary Utopias. The dominant contemporary political framing of irregularised migration as a European problem thus leans on an imagined transnational ‘European civilisation’, concretised in the contemporary EU but with roots stretching back centuries. This article examines critical cultural treatments of legal and policy frameworks, grounded in a (supra-)nationalist civilisational myth, which now determine the treatment of irregularised migrants. Specifically, I examine three cultural texts (a novel, a film, and documentary artwork) produced in the years immediately preceding the development of the current Dublin III Regulation, which determines how and where asylum claims are processed in the EU. These three realist primary texts counter the official techno-scientific discourse of territorial integrity using science fictional narrative strategies, generic conventions, and tropes: the 2012 documentary artwork Liquid Traces: The Left to Die Boat Case by Forensic Architecture uses science fictional visualisations to directly confront the deadly effects of European bordering in the Mediterranean. Aki Kaurismäki’s film Le Havre (2011), shows how twentieth-century history haunts contemporary migration fears by spatialising multiple temporalities in the titular city. Finally, Chika Unigwe’s novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), explores the colonial dynamics of irregularised migration and the complexities of individual agency, producing a form of critical dystopian engagement with the social and political conditions of the present without being a generic dystopia. These three texts expose the dangers and violence of European bordering, and counter the science fictional civilisational fantasies of its policies. They share an emphasis on the need for solidarity, resistance, and, via encounters with the spectral presences of Europe’s past, they demand forms of historical justice which will break with contemporary dystopian conditions and the hard borders of the present

Using rotor inertia as stored energy in below rated wind farms to provide primary frequency response

The objective of this work is to present a method for providing ancillary services to the grid with minimal reduction in power output from the turbines in a wind farm by utilising the stored energy in the turbine rotors. By first demonstrating an approach of extracting energy from a single turbine's rotor, it can be shown that this could lead to increased energy yields while still being able to provide primary response provision compared to curtailing each turbine by 10%. Following this, when this approach is tested at the wind farm level there is considerable evidence that considering the energy stored in the turbine rotors across a wind farm can lead to increases in energy capture while not significantly increasing damage equivalent loads for either towers or blades

Distributed control of wind farm power set points to minimise fatigue loads

The quantity and size of wind farms continue to grow as countries around the world strive to meet ambitious targets for renewable electricity generation such as the UK government's Net Zero target of increasing offshore wind energy from current levels (circa 6 GW) to circa 75 GW by 2050. With increasing size and quantity of wind farms, there is a growing requirement to use wind farm level control both to help with grid integration and to minimise the loads on the turbines in the farm. In this paper, a methodology of distributing power set points through a wind farm to minimise the loads on the turbines whilst meeting a delta power set point for the farm is presented. The methodology in this paper uses a hierarchical control structure, in which a network wind farm controller calculates the required change in wind farm power and then passes this value on to a distributed controller that defines the change in power required from each wind turbine. The network wind farm controller calculates a delta change in wind farm power that the wind farm holds in reserve. The distributed controller allocates the reductions in power output by first setting a baseline reduction that considers the steady state tower loads. The baseline is then adjusted to meet the required change in power, distributing the additional change in one of two ways; either proportional to the square of each turbines estimated wind speed or proportional to the initial baseline. Performance is assessed using the StrathFarm simulation tool. The wind turbine models incorporated into StrathFarm are sufficiently detailed to provide the tower and blade loads and the wind field model is sufficiently detailed to represent turbulence, wind shear, tower shadow and wakes and their interaction. The performance of the proposed wind farm controllers are assessed for a range of wind conditions for two 4x4 wind farms of 5MW wind turbines, one closely spaced (500m) and one less closely spaced (1000m). Both the accuracy of the change in power output from the wind farm and the change in turbines DELs are discussed. Depending on the wind conditions, the approach is found to reduce the tower and blade loads by about 10% more than the case in which each turbine is simply allocated the same change in power. There is good accuracy in the change in power at higher wind speeds. Below rated wind speed, wake effects reduce the accuracy of the change in power

Yaw control for 20MW offshore multi rotor system

A Simulink model of a 20MW multi rotor system (MRS) is built containing all the necessary detail to demonstrate yaw control for a novel yawing technique. The aerodynamics of each rotor are based on blade element momentum theory summed across a single actuator with the rotor and power conversion system modelled as a lumped mass model. A yaw controller is designed which operates by manipulating the thrusts of the rotors. The feasibility of this yaw mechanism is demonstrated by implementing it at wind speeds of 8m/s, 11m/s and 15m/s. At each wind speed the system remained stable with the yaw error kept within a maximum of 5 degrees over a two hour period

Design of optimal velocity tracking controllers for one and two-body point absorber wave energy converters

Point absorber Wave Energy Converters (WECs) are typically operated using linear damping control in which the resistive force of the power take-off (PTO) is linearly proportional to the velocity of the floater. Such algorithms are used predominantly due to their simplicity and ease of application, however, it is known that such control is far from optimal in terms of energy capture. Previous studies in the literature have seen a number of different, more advanced control methodologies proposed, however, in the main, these have been applied to single body point absorbers. The main objective of the work presented here is to develop and implement a novel two-body WEC optimal velocity tracking controller design methodology. First, an Optimal Velocity Tracking (OVT) controller is designed using a novel controller design model and applied to a WEC-Sim model of a utility scale single-body point absorber. The methodology is then extended to the two-body point absorber WEC case and an OVT controller is designed for a utility scale two-body WEC. The increase in energy capture for a site in UK waters, based on WEC-Sim simulations and compared to typical linear damping control, is 23% for the one-body WEC and 20% for the two-body WEC

Dynamic wind power plant control for system integration using the generator response following concept

In this paper, a novel concept to integrate High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC)-connected offshore wind power plants with the onshore grid is presented. The concept makes use of a holistic wind farm controller along with a fully instrumented conventional synchronous generator at the point of common coupling. In our approach, the wind farm is able to replicate the natural response of the generator to a system, even enabling the wind farm to reproduce, in a scaled up manner, a range of ancillary services without having to rely on indirect frequency measurements which are prone to noise and delays. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed solution