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…
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 first is the tragic ending. The regime wins. The protagonist is broken. The novel closes with the reader feeling the full weight of the loss, and the warning the book…
There is a structural assumption built into almost every canonical dystopian novel of the twentieth century, and most readers have never noticed it because they have never been given a reason to look for it. The assumption is that freedom is the baseline. The novel begins inside a regime, but the regime is understood, by…
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…
There are two kinds of adaptation changes. Most of them are cosmetic — a scene compressed, a character merged, a piece of dialogue tightened. Readers notice them, complain about them, get over them. The story underneath is the same story. And then there are changes that aren’t cosmetic. Changes that tell you the adapter has…
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 say Brave New World. A few clever ones will reach back to Jack London’s The Iron Heel or H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes. Almost none will say We. Which…