Charis Tom

About the author

Fahrenheit 451 Is Not About Book Burning. It’s About Why the Books Stopped Mattering.

There is a particular way Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 gets summarised, and the summary tells you almost nothing about what the novel is doing. The...

What Parable of the Sower Is Actually Doing With Its Scripture

There is a particular way Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower gets praised, and the praise tells you something important about what the novel...

What Never Let Me Go Is Actually Doing in the Sentences

There is a particular kind of disappointment that some readers feel after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. They have heard the novel is...

The Road Is Not the Novel You Think You Read

There is a small but consistent pattern in how people talk about Cormac McCarthy's The Road. They remember it as bleak. They remember it as...

Man’s Search for Meaning Is Not the Book Most Readers Think They Have Read

There is a small book that almost everyone has heard of and that almost no one has read carefully. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning...

Why D-503 and Offred Are Telling Different Stories About the Same Regime

There is a comparison that almost no critical writing has performed, and that, when performed carefully, reveals one of the most important structural facts...

Reading 1984 and Wizard of the Crow Together, in Detail, for the First Time

There is a comparative analysis the canon has been quietly refusing to perform for nearly twenty years. George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, is the...

What Huxley Took From Zamyatin, and What He Failed to Take

There is a small literary mystery that has been hovering at the edge of the blog's previous posts on Brave New World and We,...

The Dispossessed Is the Western Dystopian Novel No One Was Taught to Read Correctly

There is a novel that almost every literate person has heard of, that almost everyone who reads science fiction has encountered, and that almost...

Brave New World Is the Most Overrated Novel in the Western Dystopian Canon

There is a list every literate person has half-memorised. The great dystopian novels of the twentieth century. 1984 is on it. The Handmaid's Tale...

A Practical Reader’s Guide to the Tradition the Canon Forgot

Across ten posts, I have been arguing that there is a body of dystopian fiction the canon has largely ignored, and that the apparatus...

The Old Drift and the Genre That Will Not Stay in Its Lane

There is a moment about two-thirds of the way through Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift when the reader, if they have been paying attention,...
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AdaptationsAfrican & Diasporic DystopiaBetween the LinesContemporary DystopiaCrossover DystopiaDystopian ClassicsPsychologyReal World Dystopias
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