Book review: A Boy And His Dog At The End Of The World, by CA Fletcher

Dystopian novels are all the rage. The genre isn’t new of course. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World remains one of the best, prophetic and disturbing, and, if the world lasts till 2032, which it probably will, his book will be 100 years old. Still it’s a rare month now when a new dystopian novel isn’t published, and what was once classified as sci-fi or fantasy has elbowed its way into the mainstream. Writing in the New Statesman recently Erica Wagner (former literary editor of the Times) suggested this might be due to “the pressures of the 21st century.” Perhaps, perhaps, though these pressures may be no greater than in previous centuries; for Climate Change now, read Nuclear Winter 60 years ago. Moreover, no fictional dystopia matches the historical realities of the Nazi death-camps or the Soviet gulag.