Dystopia
Story Stream
The Postapocalyptic Movie Survivability Index May 31, 2024
Furiosa severs her own arm to escape Dementus. Sure, it’s fucking awesome. But would you do it? Would you eat human flesh to survive worldwide ecocide? Would you bury yourself underground to escape fire-breathing dragons? Would you start a revolution...
Harmony Korine Turns Miami Into a Dystopia May 13, 2024
Harmony Korine is out of his element. He's in London for the opening of his new art show at Hauser & Wirth, and he seems a bit lost."What is this park? I dunno what the fuck this is, it's just green, it's got grass."The leafy expanses of London — Gro...
Our Humdrum Dystopia May 02, 2024
Walking around in New York in 2024 is an odd experience. While the framework of street life, to the naked eye, is largely the same as it was, say, 20 years ago, there are flashes—touches—of dystopian science fiction. Uptown, where I live, it’s genuin...
The Death of Dystopia December 11, 2023
When Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song won the Booker Prize last week, the notorious non-event managed to generate some unexpected attention beyond the unhappy few that still read contemporary fiction. Lynch’s dystopia, set in a fascist authoritarian I...
Towards a Brave New World October 06, 2023
Dog owners can tell when their pets are bored. They are aware of the satisfaction an animal experiences when carrying out something they learned earlier, even if it’s just coming to heel. Some dogs encourage their owners to engage in demanding activi...
The Empty Indifference of ‘Black Mirror’ June 23, 2023
After a four-year break, the British series “Black Mirror” has returned with five new episodes now streaming on Netflix. The show touts itself as an updated version of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” and although “Black Mirror” certainly has eleme...
Review of Patrick Deneen’s 'Regime Change' June 20, 2023
For those of a conservative cast of mind, few Hollywood films present a more thought-provoking scenario than M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 drama The Village. The movie is mostly set in a Puritan-styled community surrounded on all sides by dense forest, i...
Orwell, Huxley and the Path to Truth March 10, 2023
In this transitionary period, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) come to mind whenever the word dystopia is spoken of as the two pioneering cult texts. These classic dystopias seem to depict complet...
Life After Westworld December 15, 2022
Dystopia is a crowded field in today’s television. As early twenty-first century reality catches up to the cyberpunk of the 1980s, streaming and cable television takes to bridging between the Way We Live Now (Mr. Robot) and the world inevitably to fo...
The Sun Goeth Down September 28, 2022
Though the pleasures of reading dystopian novels may be as varied as the fallen worlds they depict, the books all have one thing in common: unlike our very real world, the crises resolve soon enough. The floods, wildfires, superstorms, plagues, refug...
