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Chan Koonchung's dystopian novel The Fat Years has caused an uproar in China and been translated into many languages, including a U.S. edition. In The Fat Years, everybody in China forgets everything that happened during a six-month period, and meanwhile the country becomes more propsperous, based on denial and selective amnesia. More »
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Check out the first trailer for The FP, a new dark dystopian movie in which gangs fight for supremacy... by playing Dance Dance Revolution. My favorite part? The bit where the gangsta tells the main character, JTro, "Dance with your mind!" More »
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Locked away because of her strange waking visions and her nightmares, Faye is seeing a disturbing vision of the world's impending destruction — even as the real world beyond her walls is actually falling apart, thanks to an oil crisis which has caused chaos and mass rioting. More »
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Rod Rees' new novel, The Demi-Monde: Winter, combines virtual reality, steampunk and harrowing dystopia. What would you do if you were trapped in a virtual hell, full of the worst war criminals the world has ever known? Find out in our exclusive book excerpt — and also, find out the terrible meaning of UnFunDaMentalism. More »
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With everything rolling towards the abyss, our only hope for a bright future seems to be the Singularity, a technological transformation of what it means to be human. But in a talk for TEDx Brussels, science fiction and horror writer John Shirley argues that there are really two Singularities — and yes, everything will be terrible in the short term. So why is he optimistic about the future of the human race? Read on. More »
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The Hunger Games movie is being called the next Twilight (and even the next Harry Potter), but will Suzanne Collins' post-apocalyptic movie adaptation live up to the teen juggernaut series before it? Check out the first-ever trailer with footage from the film, including scenes inside the games, at the Capitol, and a look at the down-trodden District 12. More »
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Andrew Niccol must be thanking his lucky stars that In Time, his dystopian movie about a world where the rich live forever and the poor die young, is coming out just as the fervor over the Occupy Wall Street movement is at a peak. In Time is all about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. More »
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This weekend, we're visiting the posthuman horror show of In Time, where people can tell how long they have to live by glancing at their wrists. But that's not the most outlandish dystopian future that science fiction has come up with — SF is full of ludicrous dystopias. More »
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Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is justly admired as one of the great dystopian novels, but just how deep does it go? Daniel Abraham, author of The Dragon's Path and many other novels, and co-author of Leviathan Wakes, explores the clues in Atwood's weirdly playful text. More »
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Book trailers are usually pretty hit and miss, but these creeptastic trailers for Robison Wells' Variant will draw you in — and then make you have to take a shower. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5846198&view=rss&microfeed=true It's Banned Books Week, and the American Library Association has a list of the most frequently "banned or challenged" books of each year, from 2001 to 2010. And the list is pretty interesting reading — the Harry Potter books were on top of the list in 2001 and 2002, then dropped to number two in 2003, only to vanish off the list in 2004. (Obviously all that sorcery paid off eventually.) More »
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The market is being flooded with dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels aimed at tweens and teens, thanks to the success of Hunger Games and similar books. But Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick seems to stand out from the pack, by virtue of its weird premise and its author's background: Bick is a former Air Force Major and child psychologist, who's done a lot of research into Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs). More »
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Want to see why we're excited about Andrew "Gattaca" Niccol's In Time? Check out this international trailer, which shows just how harsh a critique this futuristic thriller is of the gap between rich and poor. More »
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Our teens are living in horrible oppressive conditions — in their imaginations, at least. Dystopian fiction, which has never been more than a minor sub-genre in the past, has become a runaway success in young-adult publishing. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5753537&view=rss&microfeed=true We're just guessing that the bioengineered paradise where a teenage girl and her clone fight over the same guy will turn out to be less than perfect once the truth is revealed, in the new young adult novel Beta by Rachel Cohn. Beta, coming Fall 2012 from Disney-Hyperion, will be the first of four books in a new series from Cohn, who's moving into YA fiction after having written several successful children's books, including the Cyd Charisse books. Here's how the press release describes the new series that starts with Beta: More »
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SFSignal asks a bunch of writers and publishing professionals what publishing will look like 10 years from now — and the answers range from the hair-raisingly apocalyptic to the mildly jarring. More »
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Prose books could become a lot more like comic books, if a new experiment from the author of Incarceron achieves success. Catherine Fisher's next series, Relic Master, is coming out monthly starting in May. More »
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Now that we know the Rapture is coming on May 21, it's time to prepare. So what will life be like after the Rapture? Judging from this awesome post-Rapture movie, it'll be just like other dystopian futures... only campier. More »
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A girl goes into cryo-suspension for an interstellar trip, only to wake early into a dystopian hell in Beth Revis' Across The Universe. Here's an exclusive look at the first 111 pages of this "Titanic meets Brave New World" novel. More »
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This week's New Yorker features a new story by the master of postmodern alienation, George Saunders. In "Escape from Spiderhead," a man named Jeff serves as a guinea pig for a love potion... and then things get really weird. More »
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Think the dystopian young-adult novel craze has died down? Guess again. A post-apocalyptic dystopian trilogy just scored over half a million dollars from a major publisher, plus a movie deal. We talked to author Julianna Baggott about her PURE trilogy. More »
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It's election day, and all indications are that the GOP will sweep Congress. What's the worst that can happen under the Republicans? Science fiction has the answer, with a wealth of stories about right-wing policies taken to horrendous extremes. More »
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Now that the Hunger Games trilogy is over, what's the next dystopian saga for teens (and loads of adults) to sink into? One title that's being mentioned is Ally Condie's Matched. Here's your exclusive first look at the book trailer. More »
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Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is one of the most talked-about novels of the year — but it's also a genuinely impressive piece of dystopian satire. Anyone who wants to see clever near-future worldbuilding should check it out. More »
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Chan Koon-chung's novel in which everybody in China forgets a month, The Fat Years: China 2013, will come out in the US and UK next year, Chan's agent tells io9. The truth will be revealed! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5605053&view=rss&microfeed=true For anyone who's curious to learn more about The Gilded Age: China 2013, the political novel we blogged about the other day, there's a fantastic new essay about it in Foreign Policy. Xujun Eberlein explains more of what makes this novel so subversive, but also provides a history of political science fiction in China, going back to 1904's The Moon Colony, in which an anti-Qing Dynasty scholar flees to the Moon, and 1932's Cat Country, a novel about cats living on Mars by legendary satirist Lao She. Really fascinating stuff. [Foreign Policy] More »
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There's an absolutely fantastic profile of Patrick Ness, author of The Knife Of Never Letting Go, over at Publishers Weekly. Find out how he sold Knife based on just a 40-page excerpt, and how he's finishing another author's book. More »
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Writer/director Albert Brooks may have predicted reality TV with his 1979 movie Real Life, and now he's got an even more dire prediction. In his first novel, coming next May, he has some nasty visions for the year 2030. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5589118&view=rss&microfeed=true It's probably too late to stop our world from turning into a dystopia. But that doesn't mean you can't nudge society towards one type of dystopia or another. To help you decide which kind you'd prefer, Flavorwire has a hilarious quiz. Options include the dehumanizing futures of Vonnegut or Rand, a breed-then-die future like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or a Canticle For Leibowitz-style wasteland. Best figure out your ideal future dystopia — before someone else chooses for you! [Flavorwire] More »
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The Arab world's most prolific and best-selling science fiction author, Ahmed Khaled Taufiq, will finally appear in English, thanks to Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing. In autumn 2011, we'll get an English version of Taufiq's novel Utopia, which isn't really utopian. More »
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The future is a beautiful place - and you can help make it that way, while picking up a paycheck at the same time. Here are 20 jobs that will help the human race avoid dystopia! More »
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The battle between Nigeria's haves and have-nots comes to a head amidst the post-apocalyptic, shattered landscape of Lagos some 50 years from now, in the new movie Kajola. Check out two trailers, full of explosions and crazy fight scenes. More »
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The Everlasting Secret Family might just be one of the darkest queer movies of all time. A secret society of wealthy, closeted gay men recruits beautiful young men as its playthings. But one "plaything" wants to stay young forever. More »
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Totalitarianism towered over the 20th century — a leader-focused, oppressive form of rule in which the individual was crushed. Now it seems to have receded as an ideal. But will it be back? We asked the expert, Zbigniew Brzezinski. More »
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Now that young-adult fiction is where most of great dystopian stories are being told, there are two awesome discussions going on. Kaitlin Ward asks what's the difference between dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. And Angie Smibert wonders where the utopias are. More »
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If you only read one manifesto this week, you owe it to yourself to read Maureen Johnson's amazing rantifesto about people who try to turn themselves into Brands on the Internet. It's the funniest, most cheer-worthy thing I've read lately. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5559846&view=rss&microfeed=true "I have trouble believing in a government efficient enough to keep track of us all in the way that the government in Orwell's novel was able to do. More »
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Boneshaker author Cherie Priest writes a heartbreaking, unsettling essay about the Gulf of Mexico disaster, and the responsibility we all share. More »
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Science fiction writers and literary agents have been blogging the past few days about how to make your setting come alive. And young-adult author Beth Revis explains why this is doubly important in a novel about a future dystopia. More »
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For 12 years, Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur has been trying to make Paani, his movie set during future water wars. Now that he's finally making it, he's tweeting photos that prove the water wars are already here. More »
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