The Daily Rumpus
Get Our Overly Personal
Email Newsletter
For the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz analyzes “meteorological activity in fiction,” and how recent questions about climate change has led to a reemergence of weather related fiction, particularly in dystopian works: Our earliest stories about the weather concerned beginnings and endings. What emerged from the cold and darkness of the void will return to it; waters that […]
...more
In the distance between me and the story, I can see all the ways I would have to change without technology, because of all the ways technology has already changed me.
...moreFor the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, two authors who invented languages to color their fictional worlds. In addition, the article considers how words created by novelists are adopted by contemporary culture: Language, as dystopian novels remind us over and over, is a barometer of a society’s health. […]
...moreFor the Guardian, Megan Quibell argues that climate change has changed dystopian fiction, as many recent dystopian works rely on a “catalyst” that stems from “the destruction of the environment.” The result is a series of books that “hammers home” the reality of climate change, which is “not something for the distant future.”
...more
Author Laura van den Berg talks to the Rumpus about why she thinks America is obsessed with dystopias, the intersection of surrealism and realism in her work, and choosing an ambiguous ending for her new novel, Find Me.
...moreWhere do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? By the time we’ve figured it out, we’ve already gotten there. Examining a trend toward futuristic fiction, Bill Morris looks at the near future as a literary setting that both illuminates and supersedes the present: …technology is changing so fast that there’s no […]
...moreThe Harry Potter series might have been helping make young kids more open and accepting of diversity, but a new crop of young adult novels might be push kids in the opposite direction of the political spectrum. Heroines like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior aren’t just strong women–they’re exceptionally special people oppressed by nanny states […]
...more