5/27/2023 0 Comments Prayaag akbar books“I’m not as interested in what may come as what already is,” says the 35-year-old journalist-turned-author, who is also the son of noted former journalist and current Indian minister of state for external affairs M.J. And that's exactly what makes Prayaag Akbar's debut novel Leila such a gripping – and terrifying – read. But at its core, the best of dystopian fiction is less an interrogation of imagined futures, and more a witness to current realities. Implicit in this reading of dystopia is a self-preserving – and usually self-deluding – sense of optimism, that however bad the future looks, we're not there yet. This is an impression that is encouraged by the genre's links to science fiction and its explorations of how technology interacts with totalitarianism – whether it's the Stalinist panopticon of George Orwell's 1984, or the post-apocalyptic technocracy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. We've been trained to think of dystopian fiction as prophecy, as a warning of dark times to come.
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