Tag: dystopian fiction

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“There is nothing one can do against those who approach. Except run . . .” So begins, not Septentrion the novel, but Septentrion the blog page. It is with this quote — a quote by himself — that Jean Raspail begins his personal blog page dedicated to his own work, a novel from 1979, recently translated into English, for the first time, after nearly 45 years. That quote is quickly followed by this one: “Death is our deepest memory . . .”, from Ernst Jünger.

What to say about Septentrion the novel without giving away the story? One will have to speak in luminous abstractions, poetic bounds, quotes, and thick or thin riddles unless . . . (more…)

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Though he has a dedicated fan base from Twitter, Zero HP Lovecraft’s (ZHPL) long-form writing allows us to experience his words beyond a mere 280 characters. This is not to suggest that the extreme short form doesn’t have its merits, but for those who need more, ZHPL’s stories have a profound delivery. (more…)

Winston & Julia, 1984

2,699 words

Love is best. — last line of Robert Browning’s “Love among the Ruins”

He loved Big Brother. — last line of George Orwell’s 1984 (more…)

2,542 words

Anthony Burgess
1985
London: Hutchinson, 1978

Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame celebrated thirty years of Nineteen Eighty-Four with his 1985. It is in two parts: a discussion of Orwell and freedom, and a novella updating Winston Smith’s struggle. (more…)

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How do you break into Hollywood? Director Grant Sputore and writer Michael Lloyd Green might have a few tips for you in their first full-length feature film for Netflix. Released in 2019, their debut, I am Mother, does all it can to please the Hollywood elite and bring a warm glow of smug satisfaction into the bleeding hearts of their old college professors.

It takes a man to write a great feminist movie, and with their all-female cast, these two guys lay it on twice as thick. (more…)

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Ash Donaldson’s novel From Her Eyes a Doctrine accomplishes several striking things which make it stand out among dissident literature. For one, it does what all novels should do: It tells an entertaining story – although in this case, we have multiple stories, some new, some old, some present, some past. A few of these stories are discrete; others are dropped off and revisited later. (more…)

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The third season of The Handmaid’s Tale is well-crafted in almost every way. The cinematography is outstanding. The dialogue is good. The acting is excellent. Its fictional universe is interesting, and it has a dark, dystopian beauty to it. However, the season doesn’t hang together. I got quite bored with it and stopped watching after getting enough information to scrape together a review. (I know what happens in the rest because I cheated and read the plot summaries after watching two-thirds of the season.)

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June 8th is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greg Johnson interviews Margot Metroland on some of Orwell’s sources and influences, the loosely “Trotskyite” political context in which he wrote, and the possibility that he was bumped off by Stalinists. (more…)

3,232 words

Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”

“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949

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“When I was little, this was a large village. And that was not too many years ago; now, there’s not so much as a single shadow. The destruction of an entire people can come about very easily!”[1]

Lao She’s Cat Country is one of the finest pieces of literature I’ve read. Written in 1932 in the long shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution and foreshadowing the Maoist terror that would wrack China, (more…)

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Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) is loosely based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. Cuarón is solidly Leftist, but Children of Men seems more and more like a Right-wing vision of dystopia with each passing year. (Cuarón’s 2001 film Y Tu Mamá También, is basically Marxist propaganda and soft-core porn, but his 2013 hit Gravity could be seen as an argument against putting women in the military or space, although I don’t think this was the director’s intention.)  (more…)

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The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 2 (2018)
Produced by Hulu
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Sydney Sweeney, Max Minghella, Joseph Fiennes, etc.

The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1) is based on the book of the same name that is both a femi-porn rape fantasy like Fifty Shades of Grey and a hard, alarmist look at the drop in the fertility of high class, intelligent, white women. (more…)