The Booklist: I have seen the future, and it’s…
Is your glass half full, or half empty? Do you wear rose tinted spectacles, or do you consider life through a glass, darkly? We’re all of us on this planet going somewhere, but where, and how?
The Suicide Shop, by Jean Teulé, (Translated by Sue Dyson)
Imagine a shop that for generations has sold all the accoutrements for the perfect suicide. This family business prospers in all its bleak misery, until the day it encounters joie de vivre in the shape of younger son, Alan.
What will become of The Suicide Shop in the face of Alan’s relentless good cheer, optimism and determination to make the customers smile. IIn this futuristic novel, which has sold 53,000 copies in hardback in France, Jean Teulé humourously explores the universal themes of life, death and family.
Jean Teulé lives in Marais with his companion, the French film actress Miou-Miou. An illustrator, filmmaker and television presenter, he is also the prize winning author of ten books including one based on the life of Verlaine. In researching that book he discovered that a group of nineteenth-century poets had founded a review called The Suicide Shop and this inspired his novel. He has also written biographies of Rimbaud and François Villon.
The Faber Book of Utopias, edited by John Carey
Every age has its utopias, from Plato’s Republic to contemporary sci-fi visions. In this spellbinding anthology John Carey charts the course of every conceivable dream world – whether communist, fascist, anarchist, green, golden age, techno-fantastic or hermaphroditic – combining a broad historical sweep with lively variety.
An experienced and imaginative anthologist, editor of The Faber Book of Reportage and The Faber Book of Science, Carey has gathered together a vast range of texts from Ancient Egypt to modern California, the authors of which, in different ways, attempt to describe a better world than our own.
Titles with any kind of attempt to predict the future – utopias, dystopias, etc. Could include classic titles that did it very well or very badly!
Sulphuric Acid, by Amélie Nothomb
Some time in the future, audiences have tired of traditional reality television shows. One channel decides to try something new and ‘Concentration’ – the reality television death camp – is born.
Participants for the show are rounded up and loaded onto cattle trucks, among them the beautiful young woman Pannonique. When Pannonique is delivered to the death camp and the cameras are turned on, she unknowingly becomes a media star, but she soon understands that her situation is all too real . . .
A huge bestseller in Nothomb’s adopted France, Sulphuric Acid is a blackly funny, shocking and provocative satire on our modern obsession with reality television and celebrity.
The First Stone, by Elliott Hall
Private eye Felix Strange doesn’t work homicide cases. He saw enough dead bodies fighting in Iran, a war that left him with a crippling disease that has no name and no cure. So when Strange is summoned to a Manhattan hotel room to investigate the dead body of America’s most-loved preacher, he’d rather not get involved. Strange has a week to find the killer, and even less time to get the black-market medicine he needs to stay alive.
In an America where biblical prophecy is foreign policy, Strange knows that his hiring is no accident. He can’t see all the angles, and he knows he’s being watched. In a race against time Strange must face religious police, organized crime and a dame with very particular ideas, while uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the very heart of his newly fundamentalist nation. One of the most stunningly original debut crime novels ever written, The First Stone is both an epic of the imagination and an action-packed mystery set in a time and place too chillingly close to our own.
It is the first in an ambitious trilogy that pays homage to the genius of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, while offering a wholly original take on the noir genre.
Visit Elliott Hall’s blog concerning all things future, including robots and zombies!
