Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958)
On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond, a king decides that the stretch of territory he can see is not enough territory, and sets about building a throne out of the living bodies of his own subjects so that he can sit...
Guy Dent's Emperor of the If and the Multiverse Before the Multiverse
In 2014, the animated series Rick and Morty aired an episode called "Rick Potion #9." In it, Rick concocts a love potion that goes catastrophically wrong, mutating humanity with a spreading virus. Rather than fix the damage, Rick...
The Quiet Supersession
In our current moment of acute anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence, the AI threat is usually conveyed through speculative visions of future reliance or machine revolt. We imagine machines that either turn against humanity or quietly replace reality itself. HAL, Skynet, or the governing systems of The Matrix...
Philip George Chadwick’s The Death Guard (1939)
In the history of speculative fiction, there are rare books and then there are lost books. The Death Guard by Philip George Chadwick belongs to the second kind.
It was published in 1939, and then history caught up with it. In his preface...
Charles Frederick Henningsen’s Sixty Years Hence (1847)
In the canon of dystopian literature, the timeline is usually set in stone. We begin with the turn-of-the-century anxieties of H.G. Wells and Jack London (The Iron Heel, 1908), move through the regimented nightmares of Zamyatin’s We (1921), and arrive at the twin...
Also published as The Secret of the League (1909).
Dystopian fiction almost always sets an ordinary person against an oppressive state. But in Ernest Bramah’s novel it’s almost the opposite. In What Might Have Been, the oppressed are the wealthy, the oppressive government is a Socialist one that won a....
