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 is on it. Fahrenheit 451 is usually on it. We is sometimes on it. And near the top, often second only to Orwell, sits Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The book…
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, realises they have lost track of what kind of novel they are reading. The book began as historical fiction. The first hundred pages followed an Italian colonial settler in the early…
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 not have a leader. It does not have surveillance. It does not have ration cards or coloured uniforms or a Ministry of anything. It is set in a country that…
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 twentieth century, dystopian novels by African writers were read, when they were read at all, as accounts of distant political conditions. The regimes they described were understood to be regional,…
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 and not another structural argument inside the African tradition. The post that does the most work now is one that turns the argument outward, takes everything the vertical has established about…
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 ritual practice that the novel calls the Eleventh Rite. Four girls, including Onyesonwu, are taken at night to a hut at the edge of their town. There they are circumcised, with…
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 in three hundred pages. The narrator, a Rhodesian girl named Tambu, looks back on the death of her brother and says, with no apparent emotion, that she was not sorry when…
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 Republic of Aburĩria begins, quite literally, to inflate. His body swells. His clothes split. His advisers panic. The cause, eventually diagnosed by a desperate medical team, is a condition that has…
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 dystopian novels. They will give you 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and, if they’re under thirty, The Hunger Games. All five are by Western writers. Four…
In 1971, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu visited Pyongyang. He came home transformed. He had seen the boulevards, the parade squares, the colossal statues, the entire choreographed city of Kim Il-sung, and he had decided that Bucharest needed to look like that too. Within a decade, Romania would tear down a fifth of its capital’s historic…