100 years in the future, 40-year-old Esther is the first of 47 sleepers to be ‘woken’ from cryogenic suspended animation in an underground bunker. Where are her children?
Margaret Atwood’s new fireproof copy of The Handmaid’s Tale protests book banning – and burning. The Venn diagram of those who burn books and those who read them is typically two separate circles.
Putin often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they normally do – a practice diagnosed by political author George Orwell as ‘doublespeak,’ or the language of totalitarians.
Two TV show have hit our screens coincidentally during the pandemic: dystopian thriller Y: The Last Man and black comedy Creamerie — both theorising a world entirely without men.
The eerie San Francisco skyline evoked sci-fi movies for a reason. Filmmakers are increasingly using color grading to tinge their films with two hues, orange and teal, to unsettle viewers.
In the current health crisis, authorities use our need for security and private firms our desire for entertainment to encourage us to give up our civil rights.
‘Dystopia’ is a term that’s gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s not a synonym for ‘a bad time,’ and a government’s poor handling of a crisis does not constitute dystopia.
The bestselling novel turned film exposes paradoxes of fixing a broken system with its own tools. As we collectively meditate on the world’s problems, why not imagine better worlds?
In the television show ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ Charles Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ makes a cameo — and its appearance makes a comment on how Gilead functions.
Adjunct Assistant Professor and a founder of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles