Quoting Aristotle when writing about yourself probably comes off as pretentious, but looking back at how I became a writer, his idea of how good stories must be “surprising yet inevitable” rings true: from a childhood split in rural Bavaria, where dark German fairytales sparked my love for books to experiments with lucid dreaming that ended in a loss of reality, my ending up as a game writer and novelist focused on the mind and dreams does sound somewhat inevitable—even if it took me some detours and distractions to get there. Now, I couldn’t be happier. 😊
From the strange title to the premise of a futuristic television star who suddenly no one remembers, this book, is the essence of why PKD remains one of my favorite authors: futurism, psychology, and existential angst distilled into a mind-bending cocktail whose characters somehow still feel perfectly grounded and believable.
Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?
Throughout the forty-one years (thirty-four of them at Oxford) I spent as a university teacher, I taught a course on Communist government and politics (latterly ‘Communist and post-Communist government’). Communist-ruled systems were never less than highly authoritarian (when they became politically pluralist, they were, by definition, no longer Communist), and in some countries at particular times they were better described as totalitarian. That was notably true of Stalin’s Soviet Union, especially from the early 1930s to the dictator’s death in 1953. The books I’ve written prior to The Human Factor include The Rise and Fall of Communism and The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age.
Fascism and Communism purported to explain all social and political phenomena and, on that basis, justified their authoritarian or totalitarian rule. The term ‘fascist’ tends to be loosely applied to intolerant and autocratic political behaviour, but the outstandingly lucid, and highly readable, book by Robert Paxton not only surveys fascism in practice – in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and in fascist movements and parties in many different countries – it also shows what its distinctive components are. What he calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of fascism include the glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, a fixation on national solidarity, rejection of the legitimacy of diverse interests and values within a society, and, not least, a cult of the heroic leader, with the leader’s instincts counting for more than reasoned, evidence-based argument.
Fascism was the major political invention of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain. How can we try to comprehend its allure and its horror? Is it a philosophy, a movement, an aesthetic experience? What makes states and nations become fascist?
Acclaimed historian Robert O. Paxton shows that in order to understand fascism we must look at it in action - at what it did, as much as what it said it was about. He explores its falsehoods and common threads; the social and political base that allowed it to prosper; its leaders and internal struggles;…
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
Another parable, another legend, another work of manual labour turned mystical. In this tale of a bridge-building gone wrong, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare considers the harms and inevitabilities that come from spanning disparate cultures. This book features a human sacrifice at the altar of erection; it feels antique and yet timeless; it explores the boundaries of human endeavor. Notes the narrator, a silenced sceptic, “all great building works resemble crimes.” It is a recognisable concern from Kadare, an exile of Hoxha’s totalitarian regime.
In the Balkan Peninsula, history’s long-disputed bridge between Asia and Europe, the receding Byzantine empire has left behind a patchwork of warring peoples who fight over everything, from their pastures of sheep to the authorship of their countless legends.
One such gruesome tale declares that a castle under construction cannot be finished until a young mason’s bride has been walled up alive, one breast left exposed to suckle her growing infant even after her death. Myth becomes perverse reality when a mason is plastered into a bridge over a strategically important river, where his will not be the last human…
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
This book imagines a world where the United States succumbs to authoritarianism. Subsequent writers have explored this theme, but I love Lewis’s novel because it captures a precarious historical moment (the 1930s) that has a lot in common with the present day.
“Buzz” Winthrop, the politician turned dictator, whips up fears about threats to America, stressing the need to get back to the nation’s “true” values. It’s a chilling portrait of a nation that loses its way.
“The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
In Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel, the Allies have lost WWII and the United States is divided up between Nazi Germany in the east and the Empire of Japan in the west.
I found The Man in the High Castle a fascinating theory of what might have become of the United States had the Axis powers been victorious. The oppression and fear experienced by the characters is palatable as each of them struggles for the best existence they can manage given their circumstances all while the protagonist searches for the author of a popular but banned novel in which the Allies won.
'Dick's best work, and the most memorable alternative world tale...ever written' SCIENCE FICTION: THE 100 BEST NOVELS
It is 1962 and the Second World War has been over for seventeen years: people have now had a chance to adjust to the new order. But it's not been easy. The Mediterranean has been drained to make farmland, the population of Africa has virtually been wiped out and America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese. In the neutral buffer zone that divides the two superpowers lives the man in the high castle, the author of an underground bestseller, a…
I became fascinated by North Korea during a six-month fellowship in Tokyo in 2008. Japan was still dealing with the aftermath of the return of some of its abducted citizens in 2002. It turned out that North Korea had been abducting people—South Koreans, Japanese, and others—since the 1970s. I began interviewing some of the returnees and embarked on an eight-year journey that took me back to Japan and South Korea many times. Throughout my research and reporting, I became convinced that the truth of the abductions, much like the truth of the region, lay between Korea and Japan. I was drawn to books that tried to come to terms with the uncomfortable relationship between two cultures whose similarities are trumped by their mutual animosity.
Adam Johnson visited North Korea once as a tourist. Based on his keen observations during those weeks, he spins a fantastic tale about Pak Jun Do, an orphaned boy who uses treachery and deception to rise to a high position in the North Korean regime. Pak is part of a crew that kidnaps a little girl from Japan, and later marries North Korea’s most famous actress. The genius of the book is that Johnson imbues the characters with believable personalities, even as he moves them through a nightmarish reality most would find completely unbelievable. The book is so good that one need not have any interest in, or knowledge of, North Korea to enjoy it.
- WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - 'You know you are in the hands of someone who can tell a story. Fantastic' ZADIE SMITH The award-winning and New York Times bestselling novel: a dark and witty story of the rise of a young orphan in the surreal and tyrannical regime of North Korea .
Young Pak Jun Do is convinced he is special. He knows he must be the unique son of the master of the orphanage, and definitely not some kid dumped by his parents. Surely it…
I'm an Emmy Award-winning writer, wife, and adoptive mother with an unapologetic passion for Black queer stories. I'm also an artist-activist who takes great pride in producing content that sparks honest dialogue and positive change. Life's complexities energize me, and, as a queer artist of color, I'm committed to reflecting these intricacies in my work. I write, produce video, and host allyship seminars as well as art as activism workshops for LGBTQ+ youth. If you're both inspired and entertained by layered depictions of BIPOC queer culture then please check out the recs in my Queer-tastic reading list. Enjoy!
The Memory Librarian is an adaptation of Monáe's 2018 emotion picture, Dirty Computer. Told in the icon's signature Afro-futuristic fashion, this unquestionably queer AF collection of sci-fi stories describes a dystopian world where dirty computers (people who stray from societal norms) are ostracized in the worse ways imaginable. What's even scarier, while the stories take place in the future, the premise isn't that far from our present-day reality.
Books that boast BIPOC themes are being banned at a record rate. And this year alone, over 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced into legislation. Just as Americans have banded together around their common causes, the inhabitants in Monáe's sci-fi saga unite as chosen family. Together they navigate technology, battle memory control, explore identity, and fight for freedom in a ruthless police state.
"Everything comes full circle. And time takes care of itself. Our work is the work of…
In The Memory Librarian music, fashion, film and futurist icon Janelle Monae returns to the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed album, Dirty Computer, to explore how different threads of liberation - queerness, race, gender plurality, love - become tangled in a totalitarian landscape... and to discover costs of unravelling them.
Whoever controls our memories controls the future.
Janelle Monae and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monae such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts -…
The idea for my first novel came from a 1946 study of Alabama parolees, linking individual characteristics to the likelihood of recidivism. The outcomes were surprising in many instances: “promising factors” such as education, profession, and intelligence didn’t correlate with good behavior. This got me thinking about the lasting effectsof imprisonment. Sentences don’t necessarily end when an inmate walks out the prison door. I see this again and again in the previously incarcerated students I teach at Helena College—they’ve been released from an institution, but mental and physical imprisonment lingers, and sometimes grows. The books on this list don’t shy away from that hard reality.
Set during the 2005 bus-driver strikes in Iran, this book explores imprisonment at nearly every level—from the confinement of a totalitarian regime to the physical and psychological torture of a political prisoner, to the locked doors of one’s own mind, to the escape sought (and sometimes found) in heroine. What sticks with me most, however, is the interior exploration of the main character, Yunus, and the way seemingly small decisions lead to enormous consequences.
An critically-acclaimed Iranian author makes his American literary debut with this powerful and harrowing psychological portrait of modern Iran-an unprecedented and urgent work of fiction with echoes of The Stranger, 1984, and The Orphan Master's Son-that exposes the oppressive and corrosive power of the state to bend individual lives.
Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical-even during the driver's strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.
As a psychiatrist-novelist, I thought it would be interesting to re-read a book I had first read as a teenager -now, to look at it from a writerly point of view, and as an adult. The story remains original and well-told., This time, though, I paid more attention to the social context Bradbury was aiming to show, something that barely caught my attention the first time round. Interesting: a sci-fi classic with a message to think about now as much as when it was written.
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
From a young age, I've been captivated by evolution and its implications for the future. I immersed myself in classical works of philosophy and literature that explored human emotions and our relentless drive to succeed against all odds, advancing human knowledge and shaping society. This fascination with understanding the future led me to write op-ed pieces on foreign policy and geopolitics for prominent newspapers in South Asia. My desire to contribute to a better future inspired me to author three nonfiction books covering topics such as the Islamic Social Contract, Lessons from the Quran, and Reflections on God, Science, and Human Nature.
I have always been fascinated by Russian authors because of their command of presenting human nature and its fears. I picked up this book because the author is from Russia.
Yevgeny wrote this novel at the height of the Russian Revolution in the aftermath of the First World War. He projected a society in a distant future, fearing that complete control of the state would turn us into monotonous machines. Anyone daring to be different would be eliminated to ensure compliance and similarity.
My only reservation is that the book borders on science fiction rather than historical fiction.
A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian with an introduction by Clarence Brown.
In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD,…
