Science Fiction used to be fun...

 In my teens and early twenties I read a lot of science fiction. It was fun, even funny (see Harrison's "Bill the Galactic Hero"). Even the most devastating of apocalypses would end on a note of hope or redemption. I'm thinking Ballard's "The Drowned World," Wyndham's "Chrysalids" and "Day of the Triffids", HG Wells's "War of the Worlds"...

Since then things seem to have changed - what do we get now? The bleakest of bleak circumstances for humanity (or a parts of it) - dystopian fiction, or what I think of as political apocalypse or science gone wrong. It's less "Dr Who" and more "Black Mirror":"The Handmaid's Tale" - so bleak I couldn't watch the TV dramatisation, Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go", Paul Lynch's "Prophet Song", Liz Jensen's "The Uninvited", Lanchester's "The Wall".

Unfortunately the pessimism in these books resonates in a bad way this year as we witness the contraction of the rights of women and minorities' in the USA and elsewhere and the continuing withdrawal of aid to developing countries combined with efforts of the richer countries to deter refugees and migrants. Plus we have a Labour government which has done nothing to repeal the Torys' draconian Public Order Act and which has banned as a "terrorist organisation" a nonviolent protest group (Palestine Action) while ignoring war crimes, ethnic cleansing and what looks like genocide in a massive scale in Gaza. 

'Nuff said.