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Nice tribute to When Belgium Ruled the World Era here from Justice The Belgian Touch you could call it Except the track abruptly wusses out about half way through and turns into filmic E-Z listening Still the first half has the doom-blare fanfares Even the title "Generator" is a perfect...

it's a cult of the second-rate and the third-rate they rejected Motown's greatest songs on the grounds that they were "commercial" meaning that ordinary people knew about them and loved them - fetishised instead the imitation-Motown labels and acts that would so loved to have had exactly the...

This could be a Boards of Canada album cover.

Also known as horse chestnuts Conkers is a traditional English schoolchild game - you toughen the chestnuts by soaking in vinegar, put a string through the center of one, knotted at the bottom, and then you and an opponent take turns swiping at each other's conker. The winner is the one that...

Wow, that's a great example - Foundation Pit. Never heard of it.

I've got that Chesterston book - never actually read it. The temperance movement allying with Islam is like an early version of that argument that the left are puritanical. On mass immigration, there's Fugue For a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest, published in 1972. Civil war in the UK...

That's probably a mini-genre in its own right - I can imagine similar sort of articles in right-wing or curmudgeon-slanted publications, like The Spectactor or Punch, about other Labour leaders. Dire imaginings of what Clement Atlee's regime would be like. (Churchill said that the...

WeWorks (as televised in WeCrashed) is kind of a touchy-feely capitalist utopia-dystopia - self-optimization, positivity, shared workspace, vibes.... The company's employee rally-call “Thank God it’s Monday” has a Ministry of Truth / 1984 quality - common sense turned inside out. WE HAVE...

would have thought so!

Glad you enjoyed it! One of those "little effort at decor / atmosphere" places where the food is great and reasonably priced.

I suppose Brave New World might count since it's a society where everything is planned - from before birth. Then again, it's a critique of a society oriented around pleasure and distraction, which correlates with a more Leftist-Brit critique of 'admass' society, American consumer capitalism...

Ah, never heard of that Lionel Shriver book - so it's definitely from a right-wing perspective? The Guardian review of it mentions a collapsed US economy / currency and a ban on people leaving the country with more than $100. Which does sound a bit like 1990 and its restrictions on emigration...

I suppose a lot of alt-right type literature must have this quality - conspiracy theory is a kind of future-present dystopian hallucination. Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is an unclassifiable one - an alt-history where failed painter Hitler emigrates to the USA and becomes a graphic artist...

Atlas Shrugged - hadn't realised that was set in the future. But then I know little about Rand apart from her influence on Rush and on techbro disruptor types.

The Wanting Seed I read as a teenager - and got a copy again recently but not reread. It's about overpopulation, right? Is the future explicitly socialist?

I have Gender Genocide and Regiment of Women but the Parley J. Cooper book goes for $130

A couple of subgenres and side-genres: anti-socialist alternative history In the 1939 collection If It Had Happened Otherwise (scholars and historians - including Churchill - engaging in counterfactual parlor games, "if the South won the Civil War", "if Napoleon escaped from Elba" etc), an...

By which I mean, not dystopias as imagined by socialists (there are plenty of these - The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, imagines a near-future dominated by advertising agencies and megacorporations, overpopulated and resource-depleted... Pohl and Kornbluth belonged to a...