Tag: dystopias
Chantal Montellier’s Prescient Dystopias | The Nation
Culture
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September 18, 2023
Chantal Montellier’s vision of the future.
A new volume collects the pioneering French comic artist’s work.
Why do we turn to dystopian fiction when disaster looms? Last year, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, protesters showed up to rallies
The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel
In E. M. Forster’s dystopian story “The Machine Stops,” published in 1909, the inhabitants of an underground society live siloed, dehumanized lives: they are convinced that the Earth’s surface is uninhabitable, and that to find interest in nature or seek out new experiences is madness. At the story’s end, the society collapses, and a fissure opens to the air above, offering a glimpse of “the untainted sky”—proof that the outside world they had been instructed to avoid was both accessible
Rediscovering a Lost Dystopia and Its Prescient Author
In the summer of 2020, Becky Brown, a literary agent who represents dead authors, went to stay with her parents in Bath. Brown was between apartments and somewhat depressed. Like many people during the first months of the pandemic, she was struggling to read for pleasure. Brown represents around a hundred and thirty literary estates at Curtis Brown, a London-based agency. Her work has made her a skilled peruser of thrift and secondhand bookstores. Her eye scans rapidly and from
The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077
Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. “The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen,” an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such