Dystopia

Caught in a Venus flytrap: Red Pyramid, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

30 March 2024 9:00 am

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

14 October 2023 9:00 am

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

27 May 2023 9:00 am

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

29 January 2022 9:00 am

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

19 December 2020 9:00 am

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

12 September 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…

Emma Thompson as Vivienne Rook in Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years. Credit: BBC/Red Productions/Guy Farrow

A clunky exercise in box-ticking: Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years reviewed

18 May 2019 9:00 am

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

19 January 2019 9:00 am

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

7 April 2018 9:00 am

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

24 February 2018 9:00 am

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

17 February 2018 9:00 am

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…

Ryan Gosling as K and Sylvia Hoeks as Wallace’s sidekick Luv in Blade Runner 2049

Back to the future

7 October 2017 9:00 am

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

29 July 2017 9:00 am

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

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…

The heavens are falling

20 February 2016 9:00 am

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

19 September 2015 8:00 am

What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…