![]() ![]() In “Severance”, the world is spinning into a deadpan chaos. Ma gives us a migrant’s tale wrapped up in a dystopia of death by remembering, a critique of American capitalism that is told from the perspective of Candace Chen, a female protagonist who is a 1.5 generation Chinese American. Almost like a reverse-engineering of “The Giver”, a utopia formed by the withholding of memory and feeling. It is a death from within, layered with themes of belonging and separation. Ma’s dystopia is not so nihilistic, but is sobering. Dystopian novels often give profound insight on a death from without - tyranny and totalitarianism birthed by patriarchy in “The Handmaid’s Tale”, pyromania in “Fahrenheit 451”, or technocracy in “Brave New World”. Yet dystopia has also never seemed quite so tenderly introspective. ![]() And it’s true there is already too much death around us. I’ve heard from way too many people that after the election, they’ve foregone reading dystopian novels because it is just too real. It might be because dystopias can be too grim or too cynical. ![]()
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