Sunday Morning! “They” by Kay Dick
This recently-rediscovered novella is a chilling anomaly in dystopian fiction: here the censorious “they” feel no need to explain, justify, or announce themselves. We know them only by their hatreds.
Category: Symposia
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
So much is happening right now that it’s hard to pay attention to any one particular thing, particularly my implausible escapades.
To the Place I Belong
By this point, I am afraid that the absurdity of all this had become too much to bear.
Country Roads, Take Me Home
If you choose to rely upon Google, Verizon, and/or Samsung products as an aid to road navigation, do yourself a favor and verify the route using traditional methods.
Eating Pizza Outside In The Snow
Symposium: We ate the pizza with “Ooohs!” and “Aaaahs!” as we took bites that burned our mouth, all while snow hit us in the face, blowing sideways.
Sunday Morning! “The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa
On a Japanese novel and film that deal in different ways with the social pressure to forget.
Sunday Morning! J.G. Ballard’s Shopping Maul
Rereading J.G. Ballard’s final novel about consumers who turn to absentminded fascism when shopping loses its appeal.
Objects Have Free Will; People Don’t
A review of The Hunger Games: Mockingbird: Part II. And some Rube Goldberg machines.
Book Review: Dystopia: a Natural History (Oxford, 2017)
A new book from Oxford University Press takes a lively and engaging look at that bleakest of topics.
Viva la Resistance!
Because every evil dystopia has its band of ragtag resistance fighters with that one in a million chance of toppling an empire.
This Cannot Be
Dear Presidential Committee:
On behalf of the nineteen Core Competencies as developed by the Consensus Statement on Presidential Attributes Sub-Committee on Selection Criteria Summit of 2048, we respectfully submit this Letter of Evaluation.
A Reflection Upon The Terms Of A Looming Divorce
What it will look like when we go our separate ways.
Dystopia Week
Welcome to Dystopia Week. Let’s begin by taking a moment to understand why we write this way in the first place.
