Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, published in 1985, is a novel whose events take place between 1986 and 1,001,986. It is narrated by a spirit following a group of people who would eventually become the progenitors of all of humanity. These people embark on the “Nature Cruise of the Century” to the Galapagos Islands and, having shipwrecked […]
Author: Amanda Baule
Climate Change Denial & the Carbon-Combustion Complex
Written by Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway who are both history of science professors at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology respectively, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014) is not a dystopian novel; it is an essay. It is an essay divided into three parts, which tells the […]
Progressivism in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, published in 1889, is an often anachronistic portrayal of the middle ages through the eyes of a 19th century engineer. The engineer, Hank Morgan, suffers a blow to the head by a man named Hercules and awakens from his stupor in the 6th century. What […]
Panopticons in Orwell’s 1984
Written by British novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic George Orwell, the novel Nineteen Eight- Four (often written 1984) was first published in 1949. It is a dystopian novel that follows in the tradition of Zamyatin’s We, Wells’ The Time Machine, and Rand’s novella Anthem. In 1984, Orwell examines the consequences of oligarchy, totalitarianism, and collectivism […]
Caution Over Evolution: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine as a Response to Social Darwinism
H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, a time well before time travel as we know it was even conceived of. In fact, I suspect that many would happily contend that The Time Machine is the original impetus for the concept that would spawn such popular media as Dr Who and the wider aspect […]