Which Dystopia Are We Living in Anyways?

It’s a cliché to say the real world resembles a dystopian nightmare, but it’s instructive to pay attention to which dystopian nightmare catches on. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shot back to the top of bestseller lists after Donald Trump’s election, but it’s still less trendy to deploy the term thoughtcrime than it is to drop this phrase: We’re living in Black Mirror. Perhaps that’s just because Charlie Brooker’s slickly intense Netflix anthology series has the buzz of novelty. Or perhaps it’s because it has nailed something beyond the mere conceit that the future = bad.

Watch for whether Philip K. Dick, the Cold War–era sci-fi author who’s never really left public memory, begins to reclaim space, based on Dick’s alternative history about a world in which the Axis Powers had won World War II, will present its third season in 2018. , a sequel to the most famous Dick adaptation, earned strong reviews last fall. Now comes , a 10-part anthology series with a rotating crew of recognizable actors (Bryan Cranston, Anna Paquin, Steve Buscemi) and established filmmakers interpreting Dick’s stories. has hyped the show as “Amazon’s answer to .”