It wasn’t until after I had finished Zoo City that I realized the author is the same Lauren Beukes who wrote The Shining Girls which is a book I really enjoyed last year. The tonal range between these two novels is huge, so I’m really excited to read more of Beukes’ work. Technically they’re both fantasy, but The Shining Girls is horror mostly rooted in reality except for one piece of magic anchoring the entire tale, whereas Zoo City is infused with magic and a […]
One step sideways from reality
How do you describe this book? Prescient? A foretelling? Crystal ball gazing? Or simply something that was written by a talented author that from a particular perspective now might be close to a possible future? I finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I’ve deliberately read it slowly to take it all in. I’ve also taken a couple of weeks to absorb it before I wrote this review. 30 years ago, it was certainly dystopian fiction several steps […]
The Mandibles
Even though I am giving this book a high rating, I want to warn everyone that it may not be palatable in light of the recent election. I actually started reading it in late November, but was still too traumatized by Trump’s winning the Presidency that I had to set it aside after a few chapters. Sometimes I’m in the mood for dystopian fiction, but I usually prefer authors who write about plausible futures, not vampire or alien invasion futures. (Stephen King’s The Stand being a […]
How should we live when the world is dying?
The Children of Men is a work of dystopian fiction with religious overtones. PD James steps out of her usual realm of detective novels/mysteries to ponder what happens to relationships (among people, between people and government, between individuals and God) when the end of the world is immanent. In 2021, it has already been 35 years since the last live human birth. For reasons that science has not been able to explain, humans worldwide have been unable to reproduce; they are simply no longer fertile. […]
Big Brother is Watching
Author Basma Abdel Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times piece about Middle Eastern authors who are writing dystopian fiction. Aziz is a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, and it seems that both her profession and her experience of the Arab Spring have informed her storytelling. Aziz has been compared to both Orwell and Kafka for reasons that will be obvious to readers of The Queue. This novel features an unnamed Middle Eastern city that has experienced political turmoil and rioting and is now ruled […]
Hey, you got 80’s nostalgia in my dystopian novel. No, you got dystopian novel in my 80’s nostalgia.
And, if you get my title reference, then you are the target audience for this novel, which is a fun read so chock full of 80’s references that it made my teeth ache. It’s a great set-up. It’s the year 2044 and teenager, Wade Watts, lives in the future version of a trailer park (only imagine all the trailers stacked on top of each other), trying to stay out of the way of his abusive aunt, who would love to sell his computer to buy […]
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