MAKING SENSE OF THE SENSLESS SINCE 2004
Years ago, I heard a passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. It was in episode 68, “Human Resources.” What impressed me was not only its power […]
Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and […]
Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering […]
In 1950, when Fahrenheit 451 first appeared as “The Fireman” in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, television was fast becoming a ubiquitous feature of the American home. The big three commercial television networks (NBC, ABC, […]
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister doesn’t focus on class war, a projected future or the awakening of an individual under authoritarian rule. It follows an exceptional man’s loss of all that makes his life […]
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]
H.G. Wells originally published When the Sleeper Awakes in 1898 as a serial in The Graphic, an illustrated London newspaper. In his preface to the 1910 edition, The Sleeper Awakes, he expressed disappointment with the […]
Jack London’s political dystopia, The Iron Heel, published in 1905, is not so fantastic as it is relevant, not so prophetic as it is cogent. The question the novel leaves you with, in this age […]
Yergeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We is not the first dystopian novel. There was The Iron Heel (1905) by Jack London and The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G Wells, Russian translations of which Zamyatin edited. It […]