Charis Tom

About the author

The Memory of Love Is the Dystopian Novel No One Recognises as One

There is a kind of dystopian novel that the Western canon has been particularly unprepared to read. It does not have a regime. It does...

The African Dystopia Was Never Regional. It Was Early.

There is a quiet rearrangement happening in the way people read political fiction, and most readers have not yet noticed it. For most of the...

What The Handmaid’s Tale Looks Like When You Read It After African Dystopia

Here's the post. Five posts into the African and diasporic dystopia vertical, the right move is to pivot once more. Not another writer deep-dive...

Why African Dystopian Novels Refuse to End the Way Western Ones Do

Every reader who has worked through the Western dystopian canon has, whether they noticed or not, been trained to expect one of three endings. The...

The Western Dystopia Mourns. The African Dystopia Imagines for the First Time.

There is a structural assumption built into almost every canonical dystopian novel of the twentieth century, and most readers have never noticed it because...

Who Fears Death Is the Dystopia the West Has Refused to Write

There is a scene early in Nnedi Okorafor's 2010 novel Who Fears Death in which the protagonist, a young woman named Onyesonwu, undergoes the...

Nervous Conditions Is a Dystopian Novel Disguised as a Coming-of-Age Story

There is a sentence near the beginning of Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 novel Nervous Conditions that does more political work than most dystopian novels manage...

Wizard of the Crow Is the Dystopian Novel Orwell Could Not Have Written

There is a moment about three hundred pages into Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow in which the Ruler of the fictional Free...

Africa Has Been Writing Dystopia All Along — You Just Weren’t Told

There is a quiet exam most readers have already failed, and they don't know they took it. Ask the average literate person to name five...

Why Totalitarian Regimes Build Massive Monuments While People Starve

In 1971, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu visited Pyongyang. He came home transformed. He had seen the boulevards, the parade squares, the colossal statues, the...

The Maekar Ending Reveals What HBO Thinks the Story Is Really About

There are two kinds of adaptation changes. Most of them are cosmetic — a scene compressed, a character merged, a piece of dialogue tightened....

Before 1984, There Was THIS Book. And Almost Nobody Has Read It

Quick test. Without checking, name the first great dystopian novel of the twentieth century. Most readers, if they're being honest, will say 1984. Some will...
1...456Page 5 of 6

Categories

AdaptationsAfrican & Diasporic DystopiaBetween the LinesContemporary DystopiaCrossover DystopiaDystopian ClassicsPsychologyReal World Dystopias
spot_img