Tag
Dystopia
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
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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 Paul. It’s a story that is very aware of itself as a story, and within which two seemingly incommensurable narratives—totalizing financial…
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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 technologies, and exonerates the people whose use (or abuse) of tech ostensibly reveals their (our!) human frailties. This is doubly problematic. Engineers are people. The technological…
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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 Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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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 nickel there are thousands of us out there. Tolkien knew how to conquer Evil; Beverly Cleary and Louise Fitzhugh put…
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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 worse than the records had ever seen, has intensified. The reservoirs are 20 percent full; the last mud puddles have evaporated off…
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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 novels and films about environmental disaster. Inevitably, they motivate big questions. Why did this happen? Is there a lesson here? Aside from survival, is there a purpose…
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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 …
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Genre Wars, Amazon, and the Market for Heart: Where Do We Go From Here?
In the past year in books, two conversations made a descent into debate—one about genre, and the other about Amazon—without necessarily being cast as two sides of the same story. It is a portrait of the writer c. 2015, who faces new realities, a multiverse of post-apocalypses, and a punishing numbers game. In a sense it…
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The Post-Apocalyptic Present
Post-apocalyptic fiction used to be disreputable, a source of pulpy thrills and nuclear terror. Flourishing in the post-World War II period, works like Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) sought to represent the aftermath of some cataclysmic event that wipes out a…
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Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot device, from the Book of Esther to Fight Club. But what seems strikingly timely about the sleeplessness imagined by Karen Russell’s novella Sleep…
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Shakespeare Off the Grid
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling symphony doubling as a Shakespeare troupe treks across the postapocalyptic landscape, performing classical music and an Elizabethan repertoire for villages in northern Michigan. While…
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Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he coined—would soon colonize our imaginations and daily experiences. Despite his ambivalent representations of technological change, his work became something of a guiding vision not only for…
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Kids in Cages
In June 2011, the State of California permanently shut down the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, a reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders that had been in operation for over a century. Since its inception in 1894, the school saw the rise and fall of variously strict, benevolent, neglectful, and sadistic regimes, all engaged in…
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What’s the Matter with Dystopia?
Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power. If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be as common as parking lots, deadly plagues as widespread as the flu, and cannibalism no more unusual than a visit to McDonald’s. Dozens…
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Global Warming and Network Think
On August 26th, 2014, in the lead-up to the United Nations summit scheduled for the following month, the New York Times carried a story on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest draft report on risks associated with runaway growth in the emission of greenhouse gases. Dramatic photographs accompanying the article showed receding ice cover…
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Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the world with his money. “Have you seen what the Rockefellers did,” he asks. “Every person in [the United States] is somehow touched by…
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Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is a product of social media, while the other is not meant to be read by others. Donald Winnicott, the influential British psychoanalyst of…
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The Hope and the Horror
In 1953, a young Jean Franco set sail from Europe for Central America. She arrived in Cuba a few days after Fidel Castro’s ill-fated assault on the Moncada Barracks. Continuing to Guatemala, she witnessed the US-backed military overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s reform government, a coup that placed the country on the road to genocidal oppression.…
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The End of the End of the World
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy may be one of the most significant works of 21st-century literature that you haven’t read. Which is surprising, since the novels have been well reviewed, avidly marketed, and abundantly sold. Yet they have been oddly absent from the radar screens of many who consider themselves aficionados of the contemporary novel. This…
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Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ecodisaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). But New York’s iconicity, as a prime example of what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls…
