Dystopia Now

Nnedi Okorafor and Cory Doctorow both released new novels in November and, though both writers set their books in near-future dystopias, they could hardly be more different. Where Doctorow set his in Burbank, California, Okorafor’s takes place all over Africa. And where Doctorow deals with MAGA, climate change, and urban planning, Okorafor describes magic, post-slavery PTSD, and the xeno-transformation of a continent’s landscape. Yet, at their heart, both are coming of age stories for young men who have lost their parents and whose worlds are in disarray.

In Doctorow’s The Lost Cause, Orphaned by a climate-related plague in Canada, Brooks Palazzo ends up living in mutual sufferance with his MAGA grandfather around the corner from Hollywood studios in “the media capital of the world.” When a caravan of refugees heads down from the drying out fruit valleys around San Joaquin, Brooks’ friends and his grandfather’s friends assume opposing battle lines. When extreme weather hits, further exacerbating the situation, Brooks decides to turn his inherited house into a multi-family residence.

Fittingly for the writer famous for coining the term enshittification for “the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets,” Doctorow’s dystopia is grim. Though couched in novel form, Doctorow’s portrayal of a country in the throes of a full-fledged climate emergency with millions of internal migrants, reads like a fleshed out response to the recent Fifth National Climate Assessment. The history between Brooks’ time and ours is a combination of best possible liberal political outcomes — two terms of a progressive President Uwayni who “took away everyones’s guns” and “packed the court” — and worst possible climate outcomes. Extreme weather, drought, disease, and air pollution pose a constant and imminent threat to stable life in the United States.

The Lost Cause is not an instructional manual, but from the symbolic paean to Burbank City Hall to the actions of Brooks and his activist friends, it reads a lot like the story of what government and civil society groups can do together in the next 20 years to mitigate anthropogenic climate change in the face of stubborn climate deniers.

Though there are plenty of internal migrants flowing across the changing face of the African continent, Okorafor doesn’t outline any similar actionable steps in her futurist world. In her 2007 novel The Shadow Speaker, Okorafor told the magical story of Ejii Ugabe and her friend Dikéogu Obidimkpa. In Like Thunder, the second in The Desert Magician’s Duology, Dikéogu has left an audio file of his subsequent adventures. The conceit of the novel’s provenance is that Dikéogu’s recording has been translated into English and preserved, even as his mind is losing its coherence.

Dikéogu’s ability to conjure the weather marks him out as a meta-Human, a “Changed One.” That is why, with his parents’ approval, his uncle had sold him into slavery. Though these parents are not actually dead—and, as a famed media couple, watchable during his travels — Dikéogu feels decisively disconnected from them. Throughout the novel, Dikéogu gradually loses his mind coming to terms with his situation in a world where spontaneous forests spring up, Ginenian immigrants have come in from another world, some human children are born with meta-human powers, and magic militias are set upon eradicating them. The narrative reflects his increasing incoherence.

No matter whether now, 30 years in the future with Brooks or 50 years in the future with Dikéogu, there’s something appropriate about facing a rapidly transforming world as a young man with special resources. A sense of invincibility, increasing autonomy, dangers of isolation, incipient mental coherence, relational insecurity — these are the developmental hallmarks of late teenage boys but also of a world facing a series of existential threats without supervising superpowers. Depending on whether you believe the best route to salvation is over-optimism and a keen sense of planning or hope and magical incoherence will probably decide which of these two fascinating but flawed novels you will prefer.