“While dystopian novels often serve as cautionary tales, The Confession of Copeland Cane is less harrowing because of the future it portrays than the mirror it holds up to our present-day situation…” Rachel León reviews Keenan Norris’ latest novel.
“In a sense, the 21st century of Demolition Night is an outdated future, since its political satire was conceived before late 2016. These days, everything before that year’s November feels like ancient history. In the Trump era, satire has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.”
“So how did Sansal pull this off?”: Jenn Solheim on dystopian narrative authority in Boualem Sansal’s 2084.
Scientific American: Novelist Ariel Djanikian talks with Celeste Ng about her vision of dystopia in The Office of Mercy.
Ana Maria Shua’s grim portrait of woman at a sadistic weight-loss boot camp.
Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, gorgeously renders a commune’s rise, fall, and life-long resonance for the people who grew up within it. Unfolding as a series of snapshots, the book’s events span the birth of this late-1960s utopia and its central character, Bit Stone, to his middle age in a bleak—and imminent—dystopic future.
In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.
