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Dystopian classics that make timely reading

Dystopian classics that make timely reading

21 June 2020

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In this fake news and post-truth era, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World and Slaughterhouse 5 have enjoyed a renaissance. These unprecedented times perhaps aren't so unprecedented...

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Huxley’s ingenious fantasy set in the future, sheds a blazing light on the present. Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone in feeling discontent, harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. Is there a cure for his distress?

There are a myriad of ways in which Brave New World still holds a mirror to our own society, despite being published nearly a century ago. As Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.'

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

'All this happened, more or less' reads the first line of Slaughterhouse 5, and it could happen again.

Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece is as timely now as when it was first published in 1969. Slaughterhouse 5 is an anti-war science fiction classic that packs a serious emotional punch, while deftly interweaving slapstick and dark satire.

The book is Vonnegut’s response to his experiences as a prisoner–of–war in Germany, where he witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden by Allied forces. It took Vonnegut years to put this experience into words, but the words he chose and the story he told have become one of the most famous in the English language: powerful and resonant of his unique worldview – weary but bursting with artistic energy, pessimistic but buoyant, playful and wise - and always, deeply relevant.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

The Handmaid’s Tale has sold over eight million copies since it was first published in 1985. 2019 saw the release of a sequel,The Testaments, and heralded a global literary celebration amongst fans old and new, while the television series originated by Hulu is now on its fourth season.

Offred is a Handmaid in the repressive state of Gilead. Like her fellow Handmaids, she must breed on behalf of her Commander and his wife. If she deviates, she will be hanged like her fellow dissenters.

The novel has chilling echoes of twenty-first century America where men are making decisions about women’s bodies and it gives full rein to Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit and astute perception. Slogans such as ‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again’ have been used at protests around the world, and Handmaid costumes have been worn in silent protest in American courts. Whether it's on the subject of totalitarianism or climate change, Atwood's words seem ever prescient and relevant. As she writes it in The Testaments: 'history does not repeat itself but it rhymes'.

If you liked these, try...

Blindness

José Saramago (Author)

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. This is not anarchy, this is blindness. ‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent

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I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman (Author) , Ros Schwartz (Translator)

SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL. Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation, now available in a beautiful hardback gift edition. Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, BOOKER PRIZE-LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATER CURE Discover the reader obsession. **Orlanda, the next sensation from Jacquline Harpman, is available now**

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The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa (Author) , Stephen Snyder (Translator)

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river, or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next? 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ‘I cried. . . cracking ending’ 5* reader review ‘I loved it!’ 5* reader review ‘A must read’ 5* reader review ‘Worth 6 stars… what a novel!’ 5* reader review ‘Dark and unsettling - a fantastic read’ 5* reader review

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