Tag: Dystopia
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Reading journal: January wrap-up
Not full reviews or even necessarily recommendations, just some notes on what I’ve been reading. I will never read all the dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction out there, but I keep trying. This month I read a very early apocalypse story by Jack London: The Scarlet Plague (free to read online). This short story feels like an ur-story…
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Recommended Reading: The Water Knife
This week I’m recommending The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. It’s a thriller wrapped up in a dystopia, a realistic and frightening vision of the havoc climate change might wreak on the American Southwest. In the near future, climate change has brought about drought and constant dust storms in the Southwest, resulting in the collapse of several…
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Book review: Three Themed Anthologies
I have never been a huge fan of short stories. I prefer to seek my teeth into something meatier, a novel. Short story collections by a single author have always felt particularly unsatisfying to me. Invariably, the stories vary in quality but share similar themes, insights, and style, so that they all start to run…
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A dystopia of our own making…
I recently was discussing with friends this new survivalist phenomenon. It is not so new, of course, but the meme that the apocalypse is coming soon has gone mainstream to an alarming degree, infecting people who otherwise seemed rational. Everyone seemed to know someone who had fully bought into the survivalist apocalyptic delusions that LaPierre…
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A present-day dystopia…
We just finished watching the first two seasons of Luther on Netflix Instant Streaming. It is a crime series starring Idris Elba, and it can be very disturbing. One thing I like about it is that even though it is set in present-day London, it has a pronounced dystopian flavor. I was trying to come up…
Shannon Turlington 