dystopia

  • Book Bingo NW 2025: Dystopia

    Book Bingo NW 2025: Dystopia

    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… Continue reading

  • Pandemic Post-Apocalyptic Podcast

    Pandemic Post-Apocalyptic Podcast

    It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted out. …With the coming of the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. – The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London Just a handful of years after the novella quoted above came out,… Continue reading

  • Beyond The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminist Dystopia & Utopia

    We always love it when worthwhile, interesting books are adapted to film or TV, as it invariably means that a multitude of readers will be drawn to the source. As sales figures and waiting lists and libraries attest, this has been quite a year for Margaret Atwood’s landmark 1985 dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, owing largely to… Continue reading

  • Omar El Akkad, author of American War, on reading and the radical act of empathy

    Our guest blogger Omar El Akkad has been garnering rave reviews for his powerful, thought-provoking debut novel, American War. Set during the Second American Civil War of 2075, American War lays bare our own fractured cultural and political existence in a dystopian fantasy that rings all too true for many others struggling in war-torn places of the world. Today he shares… Continue reading

  • The World Ends Today at 12:05

    We’ve had hundreds of murders, scores of heists and scams, repeated instances of paranormal activity, and even a bit of cannibalism. Yet is rare that we’ll destroy an entire planet. But during Thrilling Tales: A Storytime for Grown Ups starting at noon today, we just might manage it. In H.G. Wells’ 1897 story The Star, a mysterious mass from outer space… Continue reading

  • Science Fiction Fridays: Three picks for the dystopia hungry reader

    Flash Point by Nancy Kress With the United States in a permanent recession, Amy is forced to participate in a reality television show where she is never sure if the dangerous threats are real or manufactured. Fast-paced and smart science fiction that manages to be gritty and frighteningly believable in its portrayal of the future. Continue reading

  • It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine…

    I most often read non-fiction; stories about societies or individuals in times of strife, war, anarchy, disease, and pestilence. I am often humbled by the civility and dignity that these individuals and groups maintain when the proverbial ca-ca has hit the fan.  As for fiction, there seem to be many dystopian pieces of work out there… Continue reading

  • Cult Classics: Nightmare Visions

    Dystopian fiction is all the rage at the moment, but grim visions of the world as it might become, or as it already is, are nothing new. Here are some masterful views of our world glimpsed through a glass darkly that are perennially popular with our readers, and with good reason. Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid’s Tale A… Continue reading

  • It’s the End of the World As We Know It

    The leaves are falling, the bubble has been popped for awhile now, and the holidays are right around the corner, which means it’s the best time to read dystopian fiction! Knowing these characters have it worse of then we do definitely puts a spring back in my step. In Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde… Continue reading

  • After The Hunger Games

    I just love a good dystopian nightmare.  I’m not sure what this says about me, but some of my favorite books take place in future worlds shattered by environmental apocalypse or ruled by terrifying and mysterious dictators.  What is it about these books that’s so appealing?  I think it might be the fun of seeing bits of our own present in an… Continue reading

  • Further down The Road: Dystopian Fiction

    If Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road – or the movie adaptation hitting theaters October 16 – piques your interest in fictional visions of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, here are some other books to check out. There’s been a massive flood and only one family, on an ark, has been saved.  Sound familiar?  The Island at the… Continue reading