Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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courtesy Penguin Random House) If really good sci-fi is all about to taking a great big, long, hard look at the dark soul of humanity, and the best of it is, then Voyaging Vol. 1 – The Plague Star by George R R Martin with art and adaptation by Raya Continue Reading From there it's a downward spiral,drugs,men,drink... and that's before the massive climate change and collapse of government.

The Best Near-Future Dystopias | Five Books Expert

Also: whether young or old, we’re living at a time where the world is often stranger than fiction. A lot of what’s happening to us— climate change, the spectre of war, a pandemic—are worked out or grappled with through these novels. I think we can see in them a future that we don’t want to happen. They can also be quite stoic. When you think through what you might do in those circumstances, it affords you—or at least you hope it does—some level of preparedness. courtesy IMDB (c) Warner Bros. Family Entertainment) Halloween would not be Halloween without Scooby-Doo! somewhere in the hauntingly spooky and hilariously freaky mix and, of course, solving a great mystery which in the case of 1999’s Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost is literally bewitching one quaint New England town. The Continue Reading This march to an increasingly unjust society rife with social inequality and political extremism is documented through the eyes of Chance, a young girl-then-woman who has been brought to the fading coastal resort of Margate by her once middle class, now junkie mother who has a predilection for choosing the entirely wrong type of men. He goes on to consider The Sahel, a region below the Sahara, which has seen an estimated 3.8million people displaced in recent years, many seeking to reach Europe, and that number is only set to climb. Dystopia? Or something uncomfortably close to the Britain we know today, where MPs pose beaming for the cameras at the opening of a constituency food bank? This is one of the great skills employed by Rankin-Gee in Dreamland, creating a vividly grim future that is never less than plausible.A “goofy white boy” with song-writing chops, he heads to America, sees Opal perform in a nightclub, and persuades her to work with him. The duo make a record which achieves cult status. is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it? A love story. A tragedy. A warning. The story of one girl and an entire society. At the same time, terrifying and hopeful. Dreamland takes the familiar and twists it a couple of degrees to show a disturbing and disturbingly credible picture of our possible future. What will happen if we keep ignoring climate change, allow inequalities to widen, allow eugenics to creep into the mainstream and build walls? Franky’s arrival awakens something long lost, if it was ever present at all, in Chance, the sense that one person can unconditionally change your life and make it better in a way that a hundred broken-into homes cannot. In Chance, the novel’s protagonist, Rankin-Gee has created one of those characters that stays with the reader long after finishing the book. Part Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, part Turtle from Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling, Chance is named with irony as hers is a life all-but devoid of opportunity.

Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista

The storyline was unpredictable in a fantastic way. There were quite a few developments that I didn't see coming but most don't hit as big twist moments, instead you're subtly given information that allows you to build your own picture. In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they’ve lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD’s business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before – well-spoken and wearing sunscreen – something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now, the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth As Margate falls into further decline, a charismatic politician, Edwin Meyer, displays an interest in regenerating the Kent coastline. Hot on the heels of the aid charities, a mysterious company known as LandSave arrives in Margate and starts to employ local men.This point about hope is interesting. I think sometimes that’s these appeal of these near-future dystopias. Something like: after the worst is over, comes the recovery. Would you agree with that? As Jessie Greengrass said during the book festival event, facing the reality of climate change is a lot like confronting the inevitability of your own death. That's incredibly hard to manage and I don't blame novelists for ending books more gently and ambivalently than with 'They died'. I find it interesting to observe this trend, though. Climate change novels have only become more common in the five or so years - prior to that I looked for and struggled to find them. The recent ones I've read ( Kim Stanley Robinson aside) explore the immediate impacts through personal narratives rather than a polyphonic multiple narrator structure. I wonder if (and would like to think that) this is a first stage in Western fictional processing of the climate crisis and that we'll soon see more sprawling epics and attempts to write ourselves better futures. The ambiguous endings make for a more comfortable reading experience, while also slightly letting the reader off the hook. They leave space for the hope that everything will turn out OK on a personal level without massive socioeconomic change, so readers can assume this if inclined to. Based on the scientific evidence, I don't think that's remotely plausible and we in the rich world need to accept that massive change is happening whether we like it or not. As I was saying before, dialogue is really hard to do. And this has perhaps sixty different voices. It’s polyphonic. Max Brooks is able to inhabit all these different characters. It’s an astounding piece of work. I feel quite evangelical about it. This combination of circumstances built over time to turn Thanet into somewhere ripe for exploitation by populist dog-whistlers. The region became fertile ground for UKIP to the extent that in 2014 an in-depth analysis of the area’s issues in the London Review of Books was titled “In Farageland”. courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers) We live in a grievously unbalanced world. No surprises there you say; one look at the 24/7 news cycle or at the place we work or the society in which we live and it becomes clear that fairness very rarely rules the day and Continue Reading

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

This is a dystopian novel based on the rising sea levels and overpopulation with families being offered cash to leave their homes and move to the coasts, despite this being a death wish. Even so, for all this bleakness, and the ominous presence of Chance’s mother’s abusive younger boyfriend Kole, Chance somehow keeps keeping on, driven largely by a need to love and protect Blue, but also by some innate sense that life, damaged and broken as it is, is worth fighting for. We are in the once refined but now rundown seaside town of Margate. This is an area already steeped in a strange, singular psychology, slightly out of step with the rest of the country. David Seabrook’s 2002 All the Devils Are Here depicted Kent’s coast as both a bolthole and a blind alley for a motley, menacing band of eccentrics. “Planet Thanet” is how Chance explains their environs to an outsider; an increasingly isolated ecosystem in decline.Dreamland – which shares its name with the long-established amusement park on Margate seafront – is a novel seven years in the making, its gestation predating the division caused by the build up to and fallout from Brexit. The B-word doesn’t appear in the book but the related and growing divides in our society are portrayed and expanded in unflinching terms. This was a perfect book for me and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys work from similar authors like Margaret Atwood. It's clear that a lot of love and research went into this book, and the imagined UK and worldwide government response to rising sea levels was both tragic and very believable.