These novels create a dystopian world where the powerful abuse their power and wreck havoc in the citizens life. Examples are George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. Going through my news app, I spotted the headline, but I probably wouldn’t have read the article, because I’m...
History remembers the presidential election of 1936 as a pivotal moment for the United States and for its democracy. That year, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip captured the Democratic Party with his populist promise of $5,000 to every citizen, financed by raiding the vast fortunes of the very rich. In response to losing the nomination, incumbent...
My home shares the same power grid as the county courthouse and jail, so when it goes out, it’s high priority to restore it. The power doesn’t go out often, but when it does, I find myself in a surrealistic confusion. What now? Since my computer’s down, I can’t write, so I decide to...
In the society of the future, people live for twenty-one years, before they turn themselves in for Sleep, a socially demanded suicide. As can be imagine, not everyone is onboard with this idea. Many people want more than twenty-one years, so when the imbedded flower in their palm begins to blink red and black,...
Though I’ve never read J.G. Ballard before, I discovered as I researched his biography that he’s been in my life for a long time. At least since the 80s, when I saw Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. This movie was an adaptation from Ballard’s book by the same name, which was an autobiographical...
When the alarm sounds, the firemen rush to the firetruck and race across town to the given address. No house is on fire. No one is suffering a heart attack. There isn’t even a cat stuck in a tree. In this dystopian American of the future, firemen do not put out fires; they start...
On Mars a group of android-slaves rebelled against their owners, stole a space ship, and came to Earth. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard must hunt them down and “retire them,” an euphemism for killing them. No doubt, you recognize this as the plot for the 1982 movie Blade Runner, an adaptation of Do Androids Dream...
Perhaps a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago about fictitious events that happened more than two hundred and fifty years earlier might seem irrelevant in our times. We have escaped our Puritan founding, haven’t we? But as I read The Scarlet Letter, I realized that it was not only still relevant,...
