Dystopian and Apocalyptic Fiction
The End We Start From by
The universally acclaimed debut novel. "Extraordinary . . . a spare, futuristic fable about a brand-new mother navigating a flooded world."--Vogue.com Pre-empted by publishers around the world within days of the 2016 London Book Fair, The End We Start From heralds the arrival of Megan Hunter, a dazzling and unique literary talent. Hunter's debut is a searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that's familiar. As London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place, shelter to shelter, to a desolate island and back again. The story traces fear and wonder, as the baby's small fists grasp at the first colors he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. Written with poise and poeticism, The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book--a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a portentous tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change. "Strange and powerful, and very apt for these uncertain times. I was moved, terrified, uplifted--sometimes all three at once. It takes skill to manage that, and Hunter has a poet's understanding of how to make each word count."--Tracy Chevalier, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with a Pearl Earring
ISBN: 0802189067Publication Date: 2017-11-07
Future Tense Fiction by
An anthology of new Science Fiction short stories from both established and emerging
ISBN: 1944700927Publication Date: 2019-10-02
I Who Have Never Known Men by
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and 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. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
ISBN: 1945492627Publication Date: 2022-04-26
Love in the New Millennium by
The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee-whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises-satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling-against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.
ISBN: 0300240481Publication Date: 2018-11-20
The Madonna and the Starship by
Only Uncle Wonder can save us from...THE DIABOLICAL LOBSTERS FROM OUTER SPACE! New York City, 1953. The golden age of television, when most programs were broadcast live. Young Kurt Jastrow, a full-time TV writer and occasional actor, is about to have a close encounter of the apocalyptic kind. Kurt’s most beloved character (and alter ego) is Uncle Wonder, an eccentric tinkerer whose pyrotechnically spectacular science experiments delight children across the nation. Uncle Wonder also has a more distant following: the inhabitants of Planet Qualimosa. When a pair of his extraterrestrial fans arrives to present him with an award, Kurt is naturally pleased--until it develops that, come next Sunday morning, these same aliens intend to perpetrate a massacre. Will Kurt and his colleagues manage to convince the Qualimosans that Earth is essentially a secular and rationalist world? Or will the two million devotees of NBC’s most popular religious program suffer unthinkable consequences for their TV-viewing tastes? Stay tuned for The Madonna and the Starship!
ISBN: 1616961236Publication Date: 2014-05-15
The Tale of Hansuli Turn by
The Kahars of Hansuli Turn, a rural village in West Bengal, belong to an untouchable "criminal tribe" epically transformed during India's independence. Negotiating the colonial depredations of the 1939-45 war and the oppressions of an agrarian caste
ISBN: 1283135981Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Zero and Other Fictions by
Against the backdrop of nativist rural narratives dominating Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s Huang Fan published thrilling urban portraits and political satires reorienting the nation's attention. His sardonic tone stood in stark contrast to the self-serious social realism then in vogue and after decades of groundbreaking work he is now one of Asia's most celebrated authors crucial to understanding the development of Taiwanese literature over the past fifty years. The first collection of Fan's work to appear in English this anthology includes Zero a futuristic novella that won the Unitas Prize and three critically acclaimed short stories: "Lai Suo" (which won the China Times and Shibao Grand Literary Prize and established Fan's reputation) "The Intelligent Man " and "How to Measure the Width of a Ditch." In Zero Xi De a young man living among the elite in a postapocalyptic world challenges the technocratic rule of a charismatic leader mirroring Taiwan's own social character in the 1970s and containing strong allusions to George Orwell's 1984. Fan's novella poignantly renders the quandary of an idealistic man trapped between conflicting claims to truth unsure of whether he is heroic or foolish in his ultimate choice of resistance or sacrifice. In the widely anthologized "Lai Suo " a naive individual becomes the pawn of powerful men intent on advancement. "How to Measure the Width of a Ditch" is an absurdist metafictional tale in which the narrator reminisces about his childhood in Taipei and "The Intelligent Man" weaves an allegorical satire of Taiwanese migration to the United States and the business expansion to mainland China and Southeast Asia. All together these remarkable works portray the tensions and aspirations underlying Taiwanese society as well as other worlds waking up from political strife.
ISBN: 1283300737Publication Date: 2014-05-10
At the End of Everything by
The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist. Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day...they don't show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There's a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they're stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all. As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place.
ISBN: 9781492673156Publication Date: 2022-01-25
A Gentle Tyranny by
2022 Christy Award Finalist!What if women unraveled the evils of patriarchy? With men safely "gentled" in a worldwide Liberation, the matriarchy of Nedé has risen from the ashes. Seventeen-year-old Reina Pierce has never given a thought to the Brutes of old. Itching to escape her mother's finca and keeping her training for the Alexia and her forbidden friendship a secret, her greatest worry is which Destiny she'll choose on her next birthday. But when she's selected as a candidate for the Succession instead, competing to become Nedé's ninth Matriarch, she discovers their Eden has come at a cost she's not sure she's willing to pay.Jess Corban's debut novel presents a new twist to the dystopian genre, delivering heart-pounding action, thought-provoking revelations, and a setting as lush as the jungles of Central America.
ISBN: 1496448340Publication Date: 2021-04-06
Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase by
In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, twenty-five contributors investigate how dystopian fiction reflects twenty-first century reality, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility. Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and the work of Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, and many others, this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilities―ends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizations―have become central to public discourse over the same period. By asking questions like "What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?" and "What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?" Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase resituates dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduces a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.
ISBN: 1771120568Publication Date: 2014-06-16
Climate Trauma by
Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of "slow violence" that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms "Pretraumatic Stress Disorder." Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.
ISBN: 0813564018Publication Date: 2015-12-04
Dystopian Fiction East and West by
Gottlieb juxtaposes the Western dystopian genre with Eastern and Central European versions, introducing a selection of works from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. She demonstrates that authors who write about and under totalitarian dictatorship find the worst of all possible worlds not in a hypothetical future but in the historical reality of the writer's present or recent past. Against such a background the writer assumes the role of witness, protesting against a nightmare world that is but should not be. She introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others, all well-known in their own countries, presenting them within a framework established through an original and comprehensive exploration of the patterns underlying the more familiar Western works of dystopian fiction.
ISBN: 0773569189Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Worlds gone awry : essays on dystopian fiction by
This collection of new essays presents some of the most recent scholarship on a genre whose popularity has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Contributors explore such novels as The Lord of the Flies, The Heart Goes Last, The Giver and The Strain Trilogy as social critique, revealing how they appeal to the same impulse as utopian fiction
ISBN: 1-4766-7180-X
