Dystopia
Waifs and strays: Gliff, by Ali Smith, reviewed
Two lonely, recalcitrant children, Briar and Rose, find themselves among a bunch of other rag-tag misfits resisting ‘re-education’ by the brutal regime in power
Nordic dream or nightmare?: The Mark, by Frida Isberg, reviewed
A test has been developed in Iceland to assess a citizen’s sensitivity and potential for anti-social behaviour. Will the looming referendum make it compulsory?
Caught in a Venus flytrap: Red Pyramid, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Sorokin’s satirical stories are not for the fainthearted, but there are few more dedicated critics of Russia's infinite bureaucracy writing fiction today
Ravenous rats
Surprisingly for a novel riffing on Orwell’s dystopia, Julia is portrayed as a cheerful young woman uninterested in politics and believing in nothing at all
Spooky, classy dystopian sci-fi: Apple TV+’s Silo reviewed
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Dystopian horror: They, by Kay Dick, reviewed
Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in…
All change: The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads,…
Primal longing: Blue Ticket, by Sophie Macintosh, reviewed
Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s…
A tide of paranoid distrust: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison, reviewed
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
A clunky exercise in box-ticking: Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years reviewed
These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’…
Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…
Down’s syndrome and dystopia in Jesse Bull’s Census
Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from…
The Book of Joan: part apocalyptic tale, part erotic poem
Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines…
The more outrageous sf fantasies give way to soft dystopias
Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…
Back to the future
Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner first came out in cinemas 35 years ago, which I was going to say probably…
1967 and all that
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…
South Africa’s Heart of Darkness
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
A gleeful vision of the future from Margaret Atwood
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
