Station Zero

A year or so back, when the Mortal Engines movie was looming, someone asked me for an article about my top ten dystopias. Then the Mortal Engines movie stopped looming, and they lost interest. But I found my rough draft for the piece in my notes, and thought it might be worth posting here. I only got as far as seven and a half dystopias, and I tried to define ‘dystopia’ pretty loosely. Also, with the exception of the final (joke)entry, I tried to stick to those which influenced my own writing, and particularly the writing of Mortal Engines. This means that a) it skews heavily towards stuff that was around in the 1980s, and b) I left out things like The Hunger Games, A Clockwork Orange, A Handmaid’s Tale etc, not because I think they’re inferior, but because I didn’t encounter them until later. And I left out 1984 and Brave New World because they felt too obvious. In other words, don’t @ me. Mordor as imagined by Alan Lee 1 The Lord of the Rings Middle Earth may loo...