Fiction/Literature

Lots of historical dystopic/utopic novels have been written, in almost any existing language, about the past, the future, and the present. Like in pop music one has heroes and stars, like George Orwell (1984, 1949 and Animal Farm, 1945), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932 but also Ape and Essence, 1948), Samuel Butler (Erewhon, 1872), H. G. Wells (When The Sleeper Awakes, 1899), Jules Verne (Paris in the Twentieth Century, 1863), Yevgeny Zamyatin (We, 1921), Ernst Jünger Heliopolis, 1949), or Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, 1940). One could add most of the novels by William Gibson (the trilogy Neuromancer, 1984, Count Zero, 1986, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988), and Margeret Atwood (the trilogy: Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and Maddaddam, 2013), Karel Čapek (R.U.R., 1920, and War of the Newts, 1936), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano or: Utopia 14, 1952, and Galápagos, 1985), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, 1953), Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or: Blade Runner, 1968, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 1974, Ubik, 1969), Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974), Cormac Mc Carthy (The Road, 2006) and even David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996). Probably there are more books that could qualify as dystopian, but these came to mind spontaneously.

But in troubled times like ... now, what are the newer dystopics, and what do they add to the ideas and messages the previously mentioned authors wanted to put through? Recently we came across Yoko Tawada: The Emissary, a subtle and complex novel built on demographic and ecological prognoses. Any others?

So far for the fiction.. Oops what a fool I am: non-fiction means that it is real, but how can the future be real at all?

(.. still thinking and hopelessly puzzled...)