Charis Tom

About the author

Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood Is a Dystopia. We Have Never Read It as One.

Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood is rarely described as dystopian fiction. It is usually categorized as literary realism.Postcolonial fiction.Feminist literature.African social commentary. All of those...

The City We Became: N.K. Jemisin’s Strangest Political Novel and Why It Matters

N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became is one of the strangest major fantasy novels published in recent years. It is urban fantasy.Cosmic horror.Political allegory.Love letter.Satire.Apocalypse...

Vox and the Trouble With Dystopian Premises That Cannot Survive Their Own Logic

Christina Dalcher’s Vox begins with one of the most immediately gripping premises in modern dystopian fiction. Women in America are limited to speaking only one...

What The Fifth Season Knows About Power That Most Fantasy Doesn’t

Most fantasy novels treat power as possession. A king possesses power.A wizard possesses power.A chosen hero discovers hidden power within themselves. Conflict usually revolves around who...

The Water Knife: Paolo Bacigalupi’s Climate Dystopia That Reads Like Reportage

Most dystopian fiction creates distance between readers and catastrophe. The future arrives with dramatic visual markers:collapsed governments,burning cities,robotic surveillance,or completely transformed societies. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water...

Severance and the Dystopia of the Slightly Late Apocalypse

Most dystopian stories begin after the collapse. The world has already burned.Governments have fallen.Cities are empty.People wander through ruins searching for food, meaning, or survival. Apple...

Station Eleven Is a Dystopia About What Survives, Not What Falls

Most dystopian stories are obsessed with collapse. They linger on the moment everything breaks, the systems that fail, the speed at which order turns...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Read as a Dystopia of Witness

There is nothing futuristic about Half of a Yellow Sun. It is rooted in a specific history, the Nigerian Civil War, and grounded in...

Why Every Totalitarian Regime Eventually Builds a Television Studio

Power, on its own, is never quite enough. It can compel obedience, but it cannot guarantee belief. It can impose silence, but it cannot...

The Memory Hole Is Real, and It Is Currently Operating: A Reading of How Regimes Erase the Recent Past

There is a moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith quietly alters a newspaper record and drops the original into a slot that leads...

The Handmaid’s Tale on Screen: What the Show Got Right, and What It Cannot Stop Getting Wrong

When The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered, it felt less like an adaptation and more like a warning siren. Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, the...

Station Eleven on HBO and the Adaptation That Took the Book More Seriously Than the Book

Most adaptations simplify novels. Characters become flatter.Themes become clearer.Ambiguity disappears.Complexity gets traded for emotional efficiency. That is usually the bargain audiences accept when literature becomes television. But...
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Categories

AdaptationsAfrican & Diasporic DystopiaBetween the LinesContemporary DystopiaCrossover DystopiaDystopian ClassicsPsychologyReal World Dystopias
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