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 latter category.
Published in 1939, the novel was a victim of a grim historical irony. In his...
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 is usually built around an ordinary citizen resisting an oppressive state. But what happens when the “oppressed” are the wealthy? When the oppressive government is a popularly elected Socialist regime?
Ernest Bramah’s What Might Have Been (1907), revised two...
