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The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. M. Keith Booker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. $49.95.
The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature is an outstanding volume in Greenwood Press' series on the study of science fiction and fantasy. Booker gives interesting readings of a number of extremely important dystopian works, including such classics as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. He also treats a number of dystopias he classifies as modern and postmodern, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, Player Piano, Vassily Aksyonov's The Island of Crimea, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. His major contribution, however, is to place the dystopias he treats in...
