It’s the Best of Times For Doomsday Books
When Omar El Akkad was writing his debut novel, “American War,” about a futuristic United States that has been devastated by civil war, drone killings and suicide bombings, he didn’t have to invent much. The ruined landscape and societal collapse he envisioned was based partly on scenes he had witnessed as a war correspondent in Afghanistan.
“I never intended to write a book about the future,” he said, sounding perplexed. “I think of it as a recasting of history.”
But a strange thing happened after Mr. El Akkad finished the novel. The calamities he described began to seem more like grim prophecy than science fiction. The widening ideological gulf between red and blue America has applied an unintended patina of urgency and timeliness to his story.
“You don’t like to imagine the endpoint of extreme partisanship, but that’s exactly what Omar’s done in this book,” said Emily St. John Mandel, author of the postapocalyptic novel “Station Eleven.”
“American War” is one of several new dystopian novels that seem to play on current anxieties, with cataclysmic story lines about global warming, political polarization and the end of democracy.
In Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel “The Book of Joan,” the planet in 2049 has been destroyed by war and climate change, and the wealthy have retreated sky wa rd to a ramshackle suborbital complex controlled by a celebrity-billionaire-turned- dictator who sucks resources from Earth.
Similar events propel Zachary Mason’s “Void Star,” a mind-bending novel in which rising seas have rendered large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, and impoverished masses huddle in favelas, while the rich have private armies and armored self- driving cars.
The future is bleaker in Michael Tolkin’s “NK3” after a weaponized microbe developed by North Korean scientists has swept the globe, destroying people’s memories.
Dystopian and postapocalyptic fiction has been a staple on the best- seller lists for years. Youngadult series like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” have sold tens of millions of copies, and literary writers like Cormac McCarthy and David Mitchell have experimented with end- of-the-world scenarios. But today’s obsession with the collapse of civilization seems
New dystopian fiction that captures today’s real anxieties.
less like a diverting cultural trend and more like a collective panic attack.
Readers are flocking to dystopian classics like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” Not long after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, sales for George Orwell’s “1984” surged.
“People are finding comfort in dystopian books, or maybe more accurately, they’re finding answers in them,” said Matt Keliher, the manager of Subtext Books in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Mr. Keliher has become a fervent evangelist for “American War,” which he predicts will be one of the spring’s most widely discussed novels.
“When you’re reading it, it’s pretty difficult not to project yourself 70 years into the future and imagine that this has happened,” Mr. Keliher said.
When he started writing the novel three years ago, Mr. El Akkad drew heavily on his experience as a war correspondent for The Globe and Mail. A passage about a volunteer distributing polio vaccinations in a refugee camp was based on an encounter he witnessed in Afghanistan. “I don’t think there’s much in this book that hasn’t happened; it just happened far away,” he said.
In “American War,” a girl has fled with her family to a refugee camp. There, she is radicalized by a rebel leader with ties to a Middle Eastern empire that has emerged as a global superpower.
Mr. El Akkad wonders if readers will be drawn in by the novel’s inadvertent timeliness .
“I can totally see fatigue setting in,” Mr. El Akkad said. “This is a disturbing image of a future that might be nearer than we think.”