All tagged English Literature

'Hum' - by Helen Phillips | Capitalist tech VS nature's solace

Written in 2019, ‘Hum’ by Helen Phillips is an accomplished and thought-provoking Dystopian text that follows a family’s day-to-day life and difficulty navigating an unpredictable scenario whilst on the trip of their dreams. If you’ve previously enjoyed Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’, McEwan’s ‘Machines Like Me’, and if you’re looking for a novel that provides ethical conundrums, modern relatability and technologically fuelled tensions, this might be one for you. Phillips holds a mirror up to a painful paradox - the more frictionless modern life becomes with embedded technologies, the more resistance and autonomy is craved.

Chain-gang All-Stars review: streaming-culture satire meets death-match league

This violent and arresting Dystopian thriller by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, explores a world where inmates in the American Prison System can opt to (or be forced to) enter the ‘CAPE’ program (criminal action penal entertainment program), exchanging their sentence to fight in a series of live-streamed ‘death-matches’ against other convicts in a bid to secure their freedom.