The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism

Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1994.

Rev. Arthur O. Lewis, SFRA Review #215 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 17-25, who calls the work "an excellent study of the dystopian implulse and its literary and social consequences," closely connected to the promise and threat of science and technology (17-18). Reviews the intellectual background from F. Nietzsche and K. Marx through F. Jameson. Gives a chapter each to A. Huxley's Brave New World, Y. Zamyatin's We, G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four; also covers B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, K. Vonnegut's Player Piano, R. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, S. Delany's Triton, W. Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, and other works of interest, including a significant chapter on "Postmodernism with a Russian Accent: The Contemporary Communist Dystopia" (Lewis 19-20). (RDE, 20/01/95)