Dystopian

"I'm a Berliner," John F. Kennedy once chanted at the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, JFK could not have predicted on the cresting wave of the Cold War that this sentence could apply to his compatriot Chris Dahlgren even more comprehensively than to himself half a century later.

Authoritarianism is on the march—and so is dystopian fiction. In the brave new twenty-first century, young-adult series like The Hunger Games and Divergent have become blockbusters; after Donald Trump's election, two dystopian classics, 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, skyrocketed to the New York Times best-seller list. This should come as no surprise: dystopian fiction has a lot to say about the perils of terrible government in real life.