A Novel Exploration of Inequality
Recommendations for the 'Novel Exploration of Inequality' Project, featuring 'Kuan's Wonderland':Julie Thorpe (Head of School & Youth Programmes, the Co-operative College):"All the evidence points...
View ArticleKuan’s Wonderland: a quick guide
Kuan’s Wonderland is an allegorical novel set in a surreal dystopian world. It tells the story of young Kuan who is taken by force to a realm called Shiyan, where nothing is as it appears. He tries to...
View ArticleWhitehall through the Looking Glass: a quick guide
Whitehall through the Looking Glass is a satirical dystopian novel set in the near future, when the Consortium, working in cahoots with multi-billionaire monarch, George VIII, dictates terms to those...
View ArticleContesting Dystopian Visions
Dystopian stories in novels, films and TV drama, have become fashionable of late. But while they compete in painting nightmarish scenarios of our future, they do not provide a shared vision of what the...
View ArticleA Novel Indictment of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is nothing more than a fig leaf to cover up the most shameless campaign to reverse the democratic distribution of power, and hand ever more control and resources to the wealthy corporate...
View ArticleCooperative Gestalt & Dystopian Fiction
Humpty Dumpty once said that a word meant whatever he chose it to mean. And the Humpty-Dumpties of modern media clearly think they can do the same thing when they use the word ‘dystopian’ to describe...
View ArticlePolitical Engagement of the Surreal Kind
[Below are extracts from my interview with Shout Out UK, about the thinking behind my dystopian novel, Whitehall through the Looking Glass, and its predecessor, Kuan’s Wonderland.]Your last book was...
View ArticleThe ‘Good’, ‘Bad’ &‘Ugly’ in Dystopian Fiction
The popularity of dystopian fiction has of late generated a lot of interest in cataloguing together novels that present a disturbing vision of the future. But without differentiating them by their...
View ArticlePower Disparity & Dystopian Breakdown
Fascination with reports on catastrophic accidents and stories about apocalyptic horrors may be due in part to a sense of relief that one has not been caught up in the former or is ever likely to be...
View ArticleUtopian Jekyll & Dystopian Hyde
Utopian portraits of the ideal society and dystopian depictions of dysfunctional governance may at first glance appear to be as different as heaven and hell. With the former, perfected laws and customs...
View ArticleDiagnosing the Dystopian Syndrome
It may not be possible to fool all the people all of the time, but history has shown repeatedly that it is all too easy to fool enough people for long enough to trap a whole country under dysfunctional...
View ArticleTriffids, High-Rise, & Lord of the Flies
Dystopian literature is often regarded as being preoccupied with an overbearing authority imposing unreasonable rules on people. While that is a central theme in novels such as ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’,...
View ArticleThe Politics of Control: Huxley, Orwell, or Burdekin?
Talk about writers of dystopian novels, and the two names that come up most will be those of Huxley and Orwell. And there’s the perennial debate about which out of ‘Brave New World’ (1932) and...
View Article20 Dystopian Classics: how many have you read?
Dystopian literature emerged in the 20th century. When the optimism for progress in the late 1800s was confronted by a series of unprecedented disasters in the early 1900s, a new genre was born to...
View ArticleDystopian Origins: how did we get here?
After Thomas More wrote ‘Utopia’ in the early 16th century, Europe was rapidly transformed, first by the major scientific breakthroughs in the 17th century, then by the political revolutions that shook...
View ArticleDystopian Writings by Henry Tam
Long before ‘dystopia’ became shorthand for any kind of terrifying event set in the future, it denoted a specific genre of political fiction. Around the first half of the 20th century, Wells, London,...
View ArticleDystopian Essays
What can dystopian fiction tell us about the society in which it is written? What do different approaches reveal about the concerns of the authors and how they want to tackle the underlying threats?...
View ArticleA-Z: 26 Curiosities from Kuan's Wonderland
Here is an A-Z selection of some of the allusions and references in Kuan’s Wonderland that may interest you (before you read on, beware of spoilers): • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: There are...
View ArticleSynetopia Quest: looking for a different world?
From H. G. Wells to Margaret Atwood, writers have reimagined our world to show up more vividly the threats facing society and impress upon us the need for radical alternatives. The Synetopia Quest...
View ArticleThe Levellers' Connection
The Levellers' quest for democratic inclusion and social justice is a theme that pervades my novels.In the beginning, the predicament of the central character in 'Kuan's Wonderland', echoes that of...
View ArticleNovel Explorations of Political Deception
Henry Tam’s Anti-Con novels – 'Kuan's Wonderland'; 'Whitehall through the Looking Glass'; and 'The Hunting of the Gods'– explore how tricksters and ideologues can con people into submitting to their...
View Article5 Predictions from ‘ The Hunting of the Gods’
I was asked what radical innovations I conjured up for the futuristic Earth in ‘The Hunting of the Gods’, and off the top of my head, I thought of five:[1] Microbot technologyMicrobots are small...
View ArticleResist Dystopia: Expose the Con
As the Con spreads through lies and misdirection, a bleak dystopian future gets ever closer. But resistance can be renewed.The Anti-Con novels – Kuan's Wonderland; Whitehall through the Looking Glass;...
View ArticleSilver Age Superheroes (DC and Marvel)
What led me to write my kind of novels? As a child growing up in the 1960s, I was fired up by sci-fi ideas, alien worlds, and superheroes battling villains of every form. Much of that was down to the...
View ArticleThe Anti-Con Mission
Have you noticed? When they lie, distort and provoke to turn people against scapegoat, they say their freedom of speech is sacrosanct. When we expose their tricks and manipulation, they attack us for...
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