Tag
Dystopia
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
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Subaquatic Homesick Blues
A Taiwanese scifi novel—set under the sea, after the surface becomes unlivable—reveals the remarkable burst of cultural freedom in 1990s Taiwan.
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Selling Violence
Some Mexican filmmakers now mirror global stereotypes about Mexico’s violence, which make the films legible for international liberal audiences.
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Meritocracy Is a Dystopia
Netflix Brazil’s 3% presents a desperate future city that nevertheless proclaims its citizens all have an equal shot at success. Sound familiar?
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Can Comics Save Your Life?
In lockdown, one shop asked for people to submit comics of “a utopian world after we survive this moment.” Hundreds around the world answered.
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MAGA: Margaret Atwood’s Gilead Again
Margaret Atwood has argued that there is “within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it …
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Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against …
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B-Sides: Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker”
Growing up, I knew and loved a string of books written by Russell and illustrated by Lillian Hoban. My sister and I read them—The Mole Family’s Christmas, The …
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Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter …
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Louise Erdrich’s Future Faith
Between nuclear-button-measuring contests that have our collective doomsday clocks perpetually set to midnight and legislative coups d’état that have …
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“The Shape of Power Is Always the Same”
What does your dream of female empowerment look like? You may have wistfully imagined that such a situation would result in more empathetic politics …
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The Misfit Resistance
What is a misfit? In Lidia Yuknavitch’s definition, the term refers to those of us who “do life weird or wrong,” who literally miss fitting in with normative models of linear progress. Childhood trauma is often the connective tissue between misfit experiences: poverty, abuse, racism, violence, and war are all familiar elements in misfit life…
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The YA Resistance
With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.”1 These complaints overlook the aesthetic inventiveness and political engagement evident in the work of contemporary YA authors such as Kristin Cashore, Daniel José Older, and…
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World without Antibiotics
Sepsis: a systemic response to infection. The body gone wild. A reaction disproportionate to its cause, one that refuses to respect the division between hearts and limbs. Diagnosing sepsis requires a sense of proper proportions. And in Surgeon X, a comic series …
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The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking …
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Bro Uprising
With Pierce Brown’s lately concluded Red Rising trilogy, the phenomenon of the blockbuster Young Adult dystopian novel that brought us The Hunger Games and Divergent has reached its eye-popping baroque. The 28-year-old author’s vision of the future divides the human race by the genetically engineered color of their skin, hair, and eyes. Reds toil at…
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Speculative Pulp Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series,” a sequence of interconnected stories published gradually over the course of a year, which Atwood claimed was an attempt to revive a literary tradition of serialization popular…
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Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds and extensive media coverage on the controversies surrounding NSA surveillance and, more recently, the inflammatory rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates. Since the Second World War,…
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Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Ask the average critic, professor, or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man—Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace—than a woman—Tillman, Winterson, Lessing. Ask them to name the protagonist of an experimental novel and they will probably do the same. Though female authors write experimental novels about women—like Renata Adler’s Speedboat…
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Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
