Has Donald Trump ruined the dystopian novel? Let`s hope not
(The Guardian Books Blog)

Sci-fi author John Scalzi has despaired at the impact on fiction of the dramatic, lurid US presidency - but the best dystopias have emerged in the toughest timesFirst it was the literary authors, lambasted by Aleksandar Hemon in June 2016 for failing to take on the era of Trump in their fiction. Hemon had declined to sign a letter denouncing Trump that more than 400 of his fellow authors had put their names to, and wondered if their time might have been better spent tackling the approaching election on the page. `One has a hard time recalling a novel that has forcefully addressed the iniquities of the post-9/11 era,` he wrote last summer. `Perhaps there is an author among the open letter signatories eager to develop a narrative in which Trump ... wouldn´t be the false cause of our discontent but a symbol of an America struggling to forestall its precipitous intellectual and political decline, to which the absence of its literature from its politics must have contributed.` Related: How can fiction compete with the drama of Donald Trump´s presidency? Continue reading...