Work Is a Funny Thing in Adelle Waldman’s ‘Help Wanted’
Nickel and Dimed meets a suburban big box store in Adelle Waldman’s unexpectedly humorous, dystopian workplace caper, Help Wanted.
dystopian fiction
Trapped in the Long Tomorrow: ‘Blade Runner’, Cyberpunk, and Our Stuck Future
Blade Runner serves our vision of an inevitable dystopian future because we live in a “stuck future”, refusing to heed cyberpunk’s warning.
Post-Apocalyptic ‘The Last of Us’ Begs the Question – Do We Ever Learn?
The characters in Craig Mazin’s hit series, The Last of Us, are just like the rest of us – violent, tyrannical, and on the verge of being irredeemable. Yet we hope for them, still.
Is Noah Hawley’s ‘Anthem’ the First Great American Pandemic Novel?
Like Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut before him, Noah Hawley hopes his novel, Anthem, can compete with reality.
The Martian Chronicles: A Tale of Two Apocalypses
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles calls out from the past to our time of pandemic and NASA’s Mars Space Rover: however far our reach may be there is no escape for humankind from humankind.
For a Feminist Dystopian Tale, ‘Red Clocks’, Is Rather Safe
Despite missing significant feminist cues, Leni Zumas' Red Clocks is a helpful contribution to popular culture's overlap with politics.
‘On Such a Full Sea’ Challenges Our Notion of Free Will, but Leaves So Much More Unchallenged
What are we willing to trade off in order to have a steady income, food on one’s plate and a house over one’s head?