dystopian fiction

12 September 2024

Unwind

The Unwind Dystology was by far one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. It’s a captivating, easy to read series aimed at young adults, but despite that, it’s nowhere near light reading. In this world, abortion is outlawed, but instead parents can ‘unwind’ their children between the ages of 13-18. This means that they ‘continue living’ in a ‘divided state’, as the euphemisms in this book say, but in reality they become glorified organ donors. It sounds horrible and you wonder how a society could ever have sanctioned this way of life. But the books expertly convince you that […]

23 February 2024

Propaganda and polyamory: Revisiting the Hunger Games

Prompted by having read the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I recently decided to re-read the Hunger Games novels. First of all, I was curious about the prequel – how can a prequel about the villain of the series tie in? The prequel tells the (love) story of a teenage Coriolanus Snow, who later becomes president (dictator would be the more appropriate term) of Panem. What an odd book to read, because how can you make a novel about an entitled narcissist, who treats people like possessions, possibly compelling? While his rise to patriotism is sometimes interesting, […]

17 December 2023

Arc of a Scythe

In the city where I live, there are quite a few public bookshelves. Whenever I leave my apartment or just happen to pass by one of them, I check them. Some time in the winter of 2023, I did my usual round past the public bookshelf while going to the grocery store. Usually the books in there are literal trash, and it’s so rare to find a good book in good condition, let alone in English. Scythe by Neal Shusterman was such a find, the cover art was striking, and after reading the description, my interest was piqued. Dystopian is […]

31 March 2018

Y: The Last Man

I was very excited when I heard about the graphic novel Y: The Last Man – a dystopian world in which all men but one mysteriously die? But I was hugely disappointed, as this isn’t the feminist utopia I was looking for. It’s anything but, and the fact that this title was written by a man should have warned me. It’s very obviously a title written by men for men, as it’s pretty much every man’s fantasy to have a world of women at his disposal, isn’t it? Well, the comic cleverly tries to avoid such implications by making Yorick, […]