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 was first published in German in 1946, under a title that translates roughly as Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything. The English edition appeared in 1959. The book…
There is a comparison that almost no critical writing has performed, and that, when performed carefully, reveals one of the most important structural facts about the dystopian genre. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in 1924, is narrated by D-503, a male engineer in a totalitarian future society. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, is…
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 most influential dystopian novel ever written. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, published in 2006, is one of the most ambitious dystopian novels of the twenty-first century. Both depict…
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, and it is worth taking seriously. Aldous Huxley denied, throughout his life, that he had read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We before writing Brave New World. He said so in letters. He said…
There is a novel that almost every literate person has heard of, that almost everyone who reads science fiction has encountered, and that almost no one has been taught to read with the seriousness it deserves. The novel is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, published in 1974. It is on the shelves of most…
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…
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 canon has given readers for thinking about dystopia is too narrow to capture what this body of work is doing. The argument has been built in stages, novel by novel,…
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,…