Whether offering hope in the dark or a warning about that which may well come to pass, dystopia challenges us to examine not only where we’re headed, but just as often where we already are; it allows us to bravely think and feel through anxieties of the present mapped onto nebulous future-spaces. While the future is always uncertain, even in the darkest moments of despair, the capacity for hope abides.
A cross-over from the Censorship category, Fernando Flores’ Brother Brontë explores a near-future company town where reading has been outlawed by the tech industrialist who owns the company and therefore the town and its citizens. Neftalí, the last literate citizen of the town, obtains a renegade author’s latest novel, igniting a spark that turns into a blaze. With the help of some renegade aunties and a Bengal tiger, they work to reclaim their town.
Set in a world where even dreams are policed, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel centers on a woman held in a detention facility due to the Risk Assessment Administration’s algorithm determining she was at risk of committing a future crime against her husband based on data collected from her dreams. To protect his safety, she is held in detention, mostly with other women also trying to prove themselves innocent of future crimes. The arrival of a new inmate sets the women and the companies keeping them captive on a collision course.
Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen tells the story of another set of inmates in detention: the sprawling Nguyen family who, after a series of violent, coordinated attacks across America, are held in internment camps for Vietnamese Americans. Echoing the historical dystopia of Japanese American citizens during WWII, Mỹ Documents is a deep exploration of family and character in extremely plausible, very near-future circumstances.
Blending cyber-punk, Africanfuturism, body horror, and a political thriller, Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase is a wild ride through a surveillance state where bodies are government property, babies can be grown in lab wombs, and autonomy is nearly non-existent. Because the previous owner of Nehla’s latest body happened to be a minor criminal, she is micro-chipped so that her husband, a cop, can monitor her every thought and move. Nehla’s fraught but stable life explodes when she accidentally kills someone who then haunts her and starts hunting down everyone she cares about, placing her long-awaited daughter (who is being grown in a lab womb) at risk unless she can unravel a massive political conspiracy.
While many dystopias examine the societal power structures that create and maintain their often-violent world orders on a larger scale, the personal dystopias that exist inside individuals can be the deepest and darkest explorations of current issues writ large, whether due to individual struggles against those external power structures or the realities of our own making. These next two novels ponder what we cling to when everything else is lost and whether it’s enough to survive, let alone live.
Readers be warned, Rekt by horror writer Alex Gonzalez is a deep dive into a personal dystopian horrorscape where grief and the worst of humanity intersect across the darkest corners of the internet; it is not for the faint of heart. After a car crash kills his girlfriend, internet horror writer Sammy Dominguez spirals, seeking out videos of the things that used to scare him as distractions from his grief, drawing him into darker and increasingly more violent corners of the internet with algorithmic precision. An examination of toxic masculinity culture, the New York Times Book Review says Rekt “highlights our gluttony for pain; explores how algorithms can pull people, like a strong underwater current, to terrible places; and shows, unforgettably, how the internet can desensitize us to atrocity.”
In contrast to 2020’s Tender is the Flesh, which uses clinical language to explore the brutality of a dystopian world where animals have gone extinct and humans are bred as food for the wealthy, Chilean author Agustina Bazterrica juxtaposes the immense brutality humanity is capable of with lush, lyrical writing in her latest novel The Unworthy. Written in the form of secret diary entries (New-to-You Format, anyone?), the novella follows the life of an unnamed woman in a strict religious convent who suffers a punishing but protected existence as an “Unworthy” for the promise of one day becoming Enlightened, while a climate apocalypse devastates outside. When a new woman shows up at the convent seeking refuge, the narrator remembers how to feel other emotions besides the bleakness of terror and resignation and must decide what is worth surviving for.
Check out these titles and more dystopia suggestions here for this book bingo square.
~ posted by V.
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