Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Russell Conwell Hoban was an American writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London from 1969 until his death.
The Dalkey Archive is a 1964 novel by the Irish writer Flann O'Brien. It is his fifth and final novel, published two years before his death. It was adapted for the stage by Hugh Leonard in 1965 as The Saints Go Cycling In.
Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995. It was originally published under the shorter title Triton.
Cloud Atlas, published in 2004, is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawaii in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title references a piece of music by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
Brabourne is a village and civil parish in the Ashford district of Kent, England. The village centre is 4.5 miles (7.2 km) east of Ashford town centre.
Catherynne Morgan Valente is an American fiction writer, poet, and literary critic. For her speculative fiction novels she has won the annual James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Andre Norton Award, and Mythopoeic Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, the anthologies Salon Fantastique and Paper Cities, and numerous "Year's Best" volumes. Her critical work has appeared in the International Journal of the Humanities as well as other essay collections.
Godmersham is a village and civil parish in the Ashford District of Kent, England. The village straddles the Great Stour river where it cuts through the North Downs and its land is approximately one third woodland, all in the far east and west on the escarpment of the North Downs. It is six miles north-east of Ashford on the A28 road midway between Ashford and Canterbury in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with the North Downs Way and Pilgrims' Way traversing the parish.
The Book of Dave is a 2006 novel by English author Will Self.
David John Lake was an Indian-born Australian science fiction writer, poet, and literary critic. He also wrote as David Lake and David J. Lake.
Wye and Crundale Downs is a 358.3-hectare (885-acre) biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in a number of separate areas east of Ashford in Kent. It is a Special Area of Conservation and a Nature Conservation Review site, Grade I. and it is part of Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Some areas are part of a National Nature Reserve, and another area is listed on the Geological Conservation Review.
The Nebula Awards annually recognize the best works of science fiction or fantasy published in the United States. The awards are organized and awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), a nonprofit association of professional science fiction and fantasy writers. They were first given in 1966 at a ceremony created for the awards, and are given in four categories for different lengths of literary works. A fifth category for film and television episode scripts was given 1974–78 and 2000–09, and a sixth category for game writing was begun in 2018. In 2019 SFWA announced that two awards that were previously run under the same rules but not considered Nebula awards—the Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction and the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation—were to be considered official Nebula awards. The rules governing the Nebula Awards have changed several times during the awards' history, most recently in 2010. The SFWA Nebula Conference, at which the awards are announced and presented, is held each spring in the United States. Locations vary from year to year.
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1949–1984 is a nonfiction book by David Pringle, published by Xanadu in 1985 with a foreword by Michael Moorcock. Primarily, the book comprises 100 short essays on the selected works, covered in order of publication, without any ranking. It is considered an important critical summary of the science fiction field.
"The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" is a 1990 science fiction novelette by American writer Dafydd ab Hugh.
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, known for his Machineries of Empire space opera novels and his short fiction. His first novel, Ninefox Gambit, received the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel.
Dark Eden is a social science fiction novel by British author Chris Beckett, first published in the United Kingdom in 2012. The novel explores the disintegration of a small group of a highly inbred people, descendants of two individuals whose spaceship crashed on a rogue planet they call Eden. It is the first in the Eden trilogy, followed by Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden.
The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award.
Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award. Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021, and won the Otherwise Award.
Far Tortuga is a novel by American author Peter Matthiessen, first published in 1975 by Random House and republished in 1976 by Bantam. Known for its unique typography and poetic prose, the novel follows the story of a group of Caribbean turtle fishermen as they sail the waters of the Cayman Islands aboard the schooner Lillias Eden.
