Never Let Me Go

Dystopian States of America features a suite of critical essays on five themes--war, pandemics, totalitarianism, environmental calamity, and technological overreach--that serve as the foundation for most dystopian worlds of the imagination.

By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle's Physics and De Anima, the author tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope.