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Global Dystopias
Stories, essays, and interviews explore dystopias that may offer lessons for the present.
As the recent success of Margaret Atwood's novel-turned-television hit Handmaid's Tale shows us, dystopia is more than minatory fantasy; it offers a critical lens upon the present. “It is not only a kind of vocabulary and idiom,” says bestselling author and volume editor Junot Diaz. “It is a useful arena in which to begin to think about who we are becoming.”
Bringing together some of the most prominent writers of science fiction and introducing fresh talent, this collection of stories, essays, and interviews explores global dystopias in apocalyptic landscapes and tech futures, in robot sentience and forever war. Global Dystopias engages the familiar horrors of George Orwell's 1984 alongside new work by China Miéville, Tananarive Due, and Maria Dahvana Headley. In “Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue,” award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders uses popularized stigmas toward transgender people to create a not-so-distant future in which conversion therapy is not only normalized, but funded by the government. Henry Farrell surveys the work of dystopian forebear Philip K. Dick and argues that distinctions between the present and the possible future aren't always that clear. Contributors also include Margaret Atwood and award-winning speculative writer, Nalo Hopkinson.
In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, and climate denial, this collection poses vital questions about politics and civic responsibility and subjectivity itself. If we have, as Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to survive it.
As the recent success of Margaret Atwood's novel-turned-television hit Handmaid's Tale shows us, dystopia is more than minatory fantasy; it offers a critical lens upon the present. “It is not only a kind of vocabulary and idiom,” says bestselling author and volume editor Junot Diaz. “It is a useful arena in which to begin to think about who we are becoming.”
Bringing together some of the most prominent writers of science fiction and introducing fresh talent, this collection of stories, essays, and interviews explores global dystopias in apocalyptic landscapes and tech futures, in robot sentience and forever war. Global Dystopias engages the familiar horrors of George Orwell's 1984 alongside new work by China Miéville, Tananarive Due, and Maria Dahvana Headley. In “Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue,” award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders uses popularized stigmas toward transgender people to create a not-so-distant future in which conversion therapy is not only normalized, but funded by the government. Henry Farrell surveys the work of dystopian forebear Philip K. Dick and argues that distinctions between the present and the possible future aren't always that clear. Contributors also include Margaret Atwood and award-winning speculative writer, Nalo Hopkinson.
In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, and climate denial, this collection poses vital questions about politics and civic responsibility and subjectivity itself. If we have, as Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to survive it.
208 pages, Paperback
First published October 27, 2017
12 people are currently reading
411 people want to read
About the author
Junot Díaz
63 books7,336 followersJunot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
October 29, 2025
I was in the mood for some short fiction and it had been a while since I picked up an anthology. I thought half of the short stories were outstanding and I loved all the essays.
Recommended.
Recommended.
Read
August 28, 2018I tend to associate Anders with whimsical and ultimately upbeat stories, but that may be because her dystopias are too painful to hold in the mind for very long, so I tend to shut them away in the cupboards of my mind and think about them as little as possible. Case in point, this extrapolation from the currents in contemporary society which insist that people don't know what's best for themselves, made concrete as a corporate-government programme called 'Love and Dignity for Everyone', and exactly as ominous as that sounds. You too will find yourself "thinking about the social contract and mutually assured destruction".
February 5, 2018
This collection does a a great job of bringing together stories that examine a broad range of dystopias. Both the stories and the essays/interviews present disastrous worlds that have been, are, and will be. These are devastating worlds that are not universal, exposing inequalities that provide the framework for and create the dystopias. In several cases the opposing utopia is very present and we see that - to quote China Mieville - "we live in a utopia, it just isn't ours."
"Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue" by Charlie Jane Anders was my favorite story in the collection. My second favorite, I think, is "Memoirs of an Imaginary Country" by Maria Dabvana Headley. I also particularly liked "Waving at Trains" by Nalo Hopkinson. And there are several others that I enjoyed a lot, but I think the collection as a whole tells a story too - providing a range of dystopias that gives scope and scale to sites of both devastation and resistance.
The essays and interviews at the end were helpful for digesting the stories, talking about dystopian stories and some interpretations. The interview with China Mieville has some parts that were intensely, inspiringly beautiful (this in particular stuck with me: "Faced with unusual difficulties, certain animals move in deeply strange, unfamiliar ways, ways that seem abruptly alien, and/but that remain absolutely theirs. Occult motion, part of, hidden in, their quiddities. Watch those bats pick their wingtip ways. Watch octopuses stilt-walk on weirdly stiff limbs, watch hares or horses swim. In those moments utopia feels so close it it hard to breathe.")
"Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue" by Charlie Jane Anders was my favorite story in the collection. My second favorite, I think, is "Memoirs of an Imaginary Country" by Maria Dabvana Headley. I also particularly liked "Waving at Trains" by Nalo Hopkinson. And there are several others that I enjoyed a lot, but I think the collection as a whole tells a story too - providing a range of dystopias that gives scope and scale to sites of both devastation and resistance.
The essays and interviews at the end were helpful for digesting the stories, talking about dystopian stories and some interpretations. The interview with China Mieville has some parts that were intensely, inspiringly beautiful (this in particular stuck with me: "Faced with unusual difficulties, certain animals move in deeply strange, unfamiliar ways, ways that seem abruptly alien, and/but that remain absolutely theirs. Occult motion, part of, hidden in, their quiddities. Watch those bats pick their wingtip ways. Watch octopuses stilt-walk on weirdly stiff limbs, watch hares or horses swim. In those moments utopia feels so close it it hard to breathe.")
March 26, 2018
A decent job done of collecting various dystopias, although the “global” is sadly much underserved; the collection as a whole is still overwhelmingly USA-centric. And “post-apocalyptic” is confused yet again for “dystopian” in a number of these pieces (these terms are not interchangeable). But Charlie Jane Anders’ “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” is worth the price of the issue/anthology alone, a deeply disturbing story that nearly made me weep openly while I was reading it on the train home from work.
January 27, 2019
This short collection from Boston review was a mostly great collection of harrowing fiction. Couple misses but some really great successes too. It felt like interspersing the stories and interviews/essays might have helped with unification, but maybe that’s just Boston Review’s format. Also, Junot Diaz only writes the intro + interview questions, so the collection did not feel spoiled by his #metoo moment last year (although it certainly shapes the perception of the interview with Margaret Atwood in a very different light).
December 27, 2018
This was interesting and at times heart wrenching, but there were places where the story wasn't very clear of what was going on or how I should feel. There were even moments where I wasn't exactly sure what the story was trying to do, which is usually okay, but the lack of clarity harmed the forward progression of the pacing. The prose itself was great, but the references to modern day apps and devices tended to throw me out of the story a lot more than I would have liked.
July 20, 2018
A compelling collection of new dystopic short fiction, interviews with Atwood and Mieville, and critical essays on the current political climate and how contemporary dystopic narratives interpret it. The diversity of stories included draw on eco-literary themes and gender non-conformity. I enjoyed this book immensely.
"Here is something I learned in the hundreds of years I spent in the center of the Earth and later in the libraries and bedchambers, pressed between your pages, carving my way out of your stories with one of the knives you gave me to show your readers that I was a spitfire, a flame-breathing beauty with black hair and barbed bits. Imaginary countries and imaginary cunts are in the same category. They are the same story." - Maria Dahvana Headley from "Memoirs of an Imaginary Country"
"Becoming a mother has allowed me to connect to the space inside each of us where our design first unfolded. I cannot see another person without witnessing them small and hairless and suspended in the fluid of their mother's womb. I cannot go outside because I'm overwhelmed by the nascence in the people around me, their once-smallness, the child faces peering out from deep within their grown ones. The fact that we are all in such a radically unfinished state, a state of such fierce becoming, squeezes me so tight I cannot breathe." JR Fenn from "Athena Dreams of a Hollow Body"
"In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick's future, not George Orwell's or Aldous Huxley's ... Dick believed that we all live in a world where 'spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political group - and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.'" - Henry Farrell from "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans"
"Jameson hews closely to the model proposed by Darko Suvin in the seventies: the SF text is dominated by a 'novum,' a materially plausible novelty or innovation - no magic allowed! - that produces an imaginative world different from the material world the author and reader inhabit (or at least, though he never says it, the world of conventional bourgeois realism). This difference should defamiliarize our own world, producing a sense of 'cognitive estrangement' that enables us to see it critically and anew ... If dystopia can no longer gain sufficient distance from our own world to generate the cognitive estrangement upon which SF's political potential hinges, we should not look to the future or to alternate words. We should, for the present, stick with the present. We just need to go deeper. To dive into boredom." - Mark Bould from "Dulltopia"
"Here is something I learned in the hundreds of years I spent in the center of the Earth and later in the libraries and bedchambers, pressed between your pages, carving my way out of your stories with one of the knives you gave me to show your readers that I was a spitfire, a flame-breathing beauty with black hair and barbed bits. Imaginary countries and imaginary cunts are in the same category. They are the same story." - Maria Dahvana Headley from "Memoirs of an Imaginary Country"
"Becoming a mother has allowed me to connect to the space inside each of us where our design first unfolded. I cannot see another person without witnessing them small and hairless and suspended in the fluid of their mother's womb. I cannot go outside because I'm overwhelmed by the nascence in the people around me, their once-smallness, the child faces peering out from deep within their grown ones. The fact that we are all in such a radically unfinished state, a state of such fierce becoming, squeezes me so tight I cannot breathe." JR Fenn from "Athena Dreams of a Hollow Body"
"In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick's future, not George Orwell's or Aldous Huxley's ... Dick believed that we all live in a world where 'spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political group - and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.'" - Henry Farrell from "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans"
"Jameson hews closely to the model proposed by Darko Suvin in the seventies: the SF text is dominated by a 'novum,' a materially plausible novelty or innovation - no magic allowed! - that produces an imaginative world different from the material world the author and reader inhabit (or at least, though he never says it, the world of conventional bourgeois realism). This difference should defamiliarize our own world, producing a sense of 'cognitive estrangement' that enables us to see it critically and anew ... If dystopia can no longer gain sufficient distance from our own world to generate the cognitive estrangement upon which SF's political potential hinges, we should not look to the future or to alternate words. We should, for the present, stick with the present. We just need to go deeper. To dive into boredom." - Mark Bould from "Dulltopia"
January 26, 2019
Disturbing little story. Read just after the now-Republican Supreme Court allowed Trump's transgender military ban, and just after reading an article about TERFs and the right-wing Christians ganging up on transgender people. Scary.
January 23, 2019
Well that gutted me. I'm not sure what to say about this. It makes me feel like we might already lover in a dystopia. It's a well written story and it tore my heart out.
July 25, 2020
This review is for Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue by Charlie Jane Anders (goodreads keeps merging the short story with a collection that includes it despite the fact that the short story was published separately on its own).
This is probably the favorite story by this author I read so far. I will not lie: the dystopian near future it portraits is deeply scary and very disturbingly close to our present at times. The story centers on two childhood friends, Rachel and Jeffrey. Rachel's loss of bodily autonomy perpetrated by "Love and Dignity for Everyone" is adroitly portrayed, as well as Jeffrey's attempt to rationalize and justify his role in the crime. I did not know that Boston Review was publishing such high quality fiction, I will keep an eye on them!
This is probably the favorite story by this author I read so far. I will not lie: the dystopian near future it portraits is deeply scary and very disturbingly close to our present at times. The story centers on two childhood friends, Rachel and Jeffrey. Rachel's loss of bodily autonomy perpetrated by "Love and Dignity for Everyone" is adroitly portrayed, as well as Jeffrey's attempt to rationalize and justify his role in the crime. I did not know that Boston Review was publishing such high quality fiction, I will keep an eye on them!
March 4, 2018
The essays were fairly good (particularly Henry Farrell's, on the world of Philip K. Dick we're all living in), but the stories were uneven at best. They began fairly weakly (with the exception of Charlie Jane Anders'), and suffered from poor plotting, overly vague allegory, or indeed, too on-the-nose critiques of contemporary society. Certainly makes me appreciate the talent of authors who can thread the needle between world-building and "relevant, but not of here and now." The last four stories or so were noticeably better, beginning with Mike McClelland's "What Used to Be Caracas." The interview with China Miéville is also an absolute must-read.
In short, a mixed bag, but the highlights are probably worth slogging through the rest.
In short, a mixed bag, but the highlights are probably worth slogging through the rest.
April 25, 2018
Very good short story about disassociation and what that means for a trans person specifically.
The prose is a bit too elbow to the side to try and be funny in the begining but that quickly fades out for a lot of good bits of writing all the way to the end. The setting is also kind of unclear about what it wants to be with lots of modern day references that feel jarring and needless, but those too are mostly frontloaded and fade away.
All that said, I'm a sucker for symbolism and the stuff with the cadavar and all the clever little tricks Charlie Anders does to play with it are what really made me love this story. Definitly recomend.
The prose is a bit too elbow to the side to try and be funny in the begining but that quickly fades out for a lot of good bits of writing all the way to the end. The setting is also kind of unclear about what it wants to be with lots of modern day references that feel jarring and needless, but those too are mostly frontloaded and fade away.
All that said, I'm a sucker for symbolism and the stuff with the cadavar and all the clever little tricks Charlie Anders does to play with it are what really made me love this story. Definitly recomend.
September 18, 2018
Devastador relato sobre la coerción social ejercida sobre la identidad de género, en clave de ciencia ficción. La metáfora que utiliza para expresar la disociación de mente y cuerpo en personas transgénero es simplemente brutal.
A veces me ha sacado un poco de la historia los guiños informales hacia el lector, pero sigue siendo un relato memorable.
Publicado en el volumen Global Dystopias de Boston Review. Ganador de un Sturgeon 2018.
A veces me ha sacado un poco de la historia los guiños informales hacia el lector, pero sigue siendo un relato memorable.
Publicado en el volumen Global Dystopias de Boston Review. Ganador de un Sturgeon 2018.
December 19, 2017
Terrifying and topical story about the loss of bodily autonomy.
Available to read online: http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charl...
Available to read online: http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charl...
July 9, 2018
While it was intense to see one of my nightmares written down, somehow it still didn't manage to capture me. Style and time didn't speak to me, even as the setting did.
October 11, 2019
Some good some bad stories. I preferred the essays and the (very short) interview with Margaret Atwood.
August 21, 2020
Global Dystopias was published by Boston Review in the fall of 2017. At the time, we supposed ourselves to be in the midst of a global nightmare. Editor-in-chief Junot Díaz cited the election of Donald Trump, climate change, skin bleaching and the Great Firewall of China as evidence that the age of dystopia had begun.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since. The coronavirus has the world in its spiky grip. Most of us are living in full, partial or pseudo lockdown. When we work, if we work, it’s from that increasingly smaller box called home. What we thought, in 2017, to be the absolute nadir turns out to be merely the first step into a bottomless chasm.
The stated purpose of Global Dystopias was to
To read the full review, please visit my website for Dystopia Now.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since. The coronavirus has the world in its spiky grip. Most of us are living in full, partial or pseudo lockdown. When we work, if we work, it’s from that increasingly smaller box called home. What we thought, in 2017, to be the absolute nadir turns out to be merely the first step into a bottomless chasm.
The stated purpose of Global Dystopias was to
point to causes [of dystopia] rather than merely describe symptoms […] to map, to warn, to hope.How has this collection of short fiction, interviews and essays withstood the test of time?
To read the full review, please visit my website for Dystopia Now.
March 14, 2025
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The year is 2024—rather than a five-year plan, a five-year projection, a five-year visioning, a five-year touching—and I am reading a China Mieville interview called “A Strategy for Ruination.”
“Salvage keeps me going. … Why is not quite clear: there is always something evasive about why particular metaphors resonate as they do. Which is fine by me. Of the various concepts that are politically/aesthetically powerful and formative—helpful—to me, salvage has a for a long time been primus inter pares. Word-magic. A retconned syncretic backformation from ‘salvation’ and ‘garbage.’ A homage to, rather than repudiation of, the trash-world wanderers and breakfasters-among-the-ruins that always transfixed me.”
The year is 2017. They published a book called Global Dystopias. Twelve years later, in 2029, they forgot all about it, Alzheimer’s.
The year is 2024—rather than a five-year plan, a five-year projection, a five-year visioning, a five-year touching—and I am reading a China Mieville interview called “A Strategy for Ruination.”
“Salvage keeps me going. … Why is not quite clear: there is always something evasive about why particular metaphors resonate as they do. Which is fine by me. Of the various concepts that are politically/aesthetically powerful and formative—helpful—to me, salvage has a for a long time been primus inter pares. Word-magic. A retconned syncretic backformation from ‘salvation’ and ‘garbage.’ A homage to, rather than repudiation of, the trash-world wanderers and breakfasters-among-the-ruins that always transfixed me.”
The year is 2017. They published a book called Global Dystopias. Twelve years later, in 2029, they forgot all about it, Alzheimer’s.
May 24, 2022
“And dystopia for some is utopia for others… we live in a utopia: it juts isn’t ours.” C. Miéville.
Some great stories in here; particularly What Used to be Caracas and Cannibal Acts. And the interview with Margaret Atwood.
Actually all of them. Great visions and hopefully not portends of things to come.
Some great stories in here; particularly What Used to be Caracas and Cannibal Acts. And the interview with Margaret Atwood.
Actually all of them. Great visions and hopefully not portends of things to come.
October 5, 2024
It was 70% good 30% meh. I really appreciated the pieces by Charlie Jane Anders, Jordy Rosenberg, Thea Costantino, Maria Dahvana Headley, JR Fenn, Tananarive Due, and Maureen Mchugh. I wish Nalo Hopkinsons piece had been longer.
I read short story collections cause they help me find writers whose voices I want to read more from and this book did exactly that!
I read short story collections cause they help me find writers whose voices I want to read more from and this book did exactly that!
June 4, 2019
This is an ok anthology. I always like when anthologies mix fiction with nonfiction essays. The essays are interesting enough. Honestly, though, I didn't find this book very memorable.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews