Pile by the Bed reviews Enclave by Claire G Coleman, a dystopian thriler in which a young woman learns there is more to the world than her strictly controlled walled community.
Pile by the Bed reviews The Memory Librarian and other stories from Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae, a series of co-authored connected short stories set in her ‘dirty computer’ universe.
Pile by the Bed reviews Metronome a by Tom Watson a claustrophobic, dystopian scenario with echoes of Waiting for Godot.
Pile by the Bed reviews Widowland by CJ Carey a thriller set in an alternative 1950s in which Germany rules Britain and women are second class citizens.
Pile by the Bed reviews The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullen a post-apocalyptic dystopia that considers the power of crowd-sourced justice.
Pile by the Bed reviews QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling a satirical dystopia which takes on the information age and big data
Pile by the Bed reviews The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball, short and disturbing connected stories set in a dystopian world.
Pile by the Bed reviews The Warehouse by Rob Hart – a new dystopian thriller that takes on Amazon and the American dream.
Pile by the Bed reviews Rogue by AJ Betts, the conclusion to the tale started in last year’s dystopian YA novel Hive.
Pile by the Bed reviews the new British dystopian novel, The Wall by John Lanchester.
Pile by the Bed reviews the Golden State by Ben H Winters – a dystopia with noir crime undertones.
Claire North used the travels of the main character in her last book The End of the Day to highlight global inequities and social issues. Despite its fantastical premise (that character we the harbinger of Death), that book focussed on the present. In 84K, North takes this social commentary into frighteningly plausible dystopian vision of the future. There is nothing particularly original about the starting point for 84K – concentration of corporate power, collusion between a monolithic Company and the Government, the wealthy coming out on top and a population sleepwalking into servitude in the pursuit of the good life. But North takes this premise further – into a monetised society, where everything, including human life, literally has a value. Theo Miller works at the Criminal Audit Office, assigning indemnity value to different crimes, If you can pay you get on with your life but if you can’t, you go into government mandated menial work – essentially slave labour or worse. Miller, is much like Charlie from The End of the Day, a grey English bureaucratic exterior hiding a revolutionary soul. And that soul slowly emerges and he is forced to take action when a face from the past emerges and he is forced to reevaluate his life. The book jumps between three time periods – Miller’s backstory, his…
The Night Market is the third in Jonathan Moore’s triptych of dark tales set in San Francisco. The first, The Poison Artist was psychological gothic horror. The second, The Dark Room, was a more down the line police procedural with decidedly creepy undertones. After the more straight forward narrative of The Dark Room it was interesting to consider where Moore would take this series. And he does not disappoint. The Night Market is something else again, a vaguely dystopian science fiction crime thriller, set in a recognisable day after tomorrow San Francisco. Once again there is a police investigation at the centre of the tale. But in this story, nothing is quite what it seems. Homicide investigator Ross Carver and his partner are called to a murder scene in a wealthy area of San Francisco. The dead body is like nothing they have ever seen but before they have a chance to investigate the FBI turns up and they are hustled from the building and roughly disinfected. Carver wakes up three days later with no memory of the events. His neighbour has been caring for him and despite little previous contact, offers to help him find out what happened during those missing hours. To say much more about the plot would spoil some of the twists. But as…
Dystopia has a long history in literary fiction. A breakdown in social order, or a reshaping of society, is a useful lens through which we can examine our own society and actions. So it comes as no surprise that Native American author Louise Erdrich is another in a long line of literary writers who have taken on dystopia. The dystopian present creeps up slowly in Future Home of the Living God. The opening passage has narrator Cedar Hawk Springmaker – ‘the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals’ – heading to an Ojibwe reservation to meet her Native American birth-family. She does mention in this opening passage that ‘Our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way as yet ungrasped.’ Cedar is four months pregnant but this is a secret that she has kept from her adopted family. Of all the sections of the novel, Erdrich treats those on the Ojibwe reservation with a refreshing naturalism. Cedar arrives to find very few of her preconceptions of her birth family met. While she seems to have a very Native American name, her birth name was Mary Potts. Her mother is welcoming but not apologetic about Cedar’s life and her…
