Sepsis: a systemic response to infection. The body gone wild. A reaction disproportionate to its cause, one that refuses to respect the division between ...
Tag: Dystopia
Louise Erdrich’s Future Faith
Between nuclear-button-measuring contests that have our collective doomsday clocks perpetually set to midnight and legislative coups d’état that have ...
“The Shape of Power Is Always the Same”
What does your dream of female empowerment look like? You may have wistfully imagined that such a situation would result in more empathetic politics ...
The Misfit Resistance
What is a misfit? In Lidia Yuknavitch’s definition, the term refers to those of us who “do life weird or wrong,” who literally miss fitting in with normative models of linear progress. Childhood ...
The YA Resistance
With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and ...
World without Antibiotics
Sepsis: a systemic response to infection. The body gone wild. A reaction disproportionate to its cause, one that refuses to respect the division between hearts and limbs. Diagnosing sepsis requires a sense of proper proportions. And in Surgeon X, a comic series ...
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking ...
Atlas Mugged
If the books of our time tell us anything anymore, capitalism has jumped the shark. Not even its most erudite defenders and critics know what to say about its future—the sense of an ending saturates ...
Speculative Pulp Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series,” a sequence of ...
Bro Uprising
With Pierce Brown’s lately concluded Red Rising trilogy, the phenomenon of the blockbuster Young Adult dystopian novel that brought us The Hunger Games and Divergent has reached its eye-popping ...
Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds ...
Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes ...
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Ask the average critic, professor, or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man—Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace—than a woman—Tillman, Winterson, Lessing. Ask them ...
To Laugh, So as Not to Weep: Paul Murray’s Modern Banking Satire
Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void is set in the bleak landscape of 21st-century banking. It’s a story about the relationship between an idealistic banker named Claude and a jaded writer named ...
Technological Citizenship at the End of the World
Technology, we like to say, is making us antisocial; truncating our attention spans; addicting us; depleting our fossil fuels. This commonplace ignores and undermines the people who develop our ...
Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by ...
Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics
What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. I can only speak for one childhood—and one adulthood—spent reading Le Guin, but I’d bet my last ...
Drought Lit
For the last several summers I’ve spent August in the Central Valley of California, swimming twice a day and eating guacamole for dinner. During the same last few years, the state’s drought, already ...
Searching for Purpose
Near-extinction stories are nearly as old as the human species, from Noah’s flood to 20th-century narratives about nuclear holocaust (1950s–60s) and pandemics (1970s–80s), to the current spate of ...
A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has ...