Why read a dystopian novel when the present already feels dystopian? In a round-up in The New Yorker of speculative fiction released during the first Trump administration, the historian and critic Jill Lepore criticised the ‘radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism … [which] cannot imagine a better future’. Her point was that the genre had become mired in despair and hopelessness; that what had once been a literature of resistance in the age of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had descended into a ‘fiction of submission’. In her masterful new novel, Salvage (2025), Jennifer Mills offers the antidote that Lepore sought: gleaming speculative fiction with a core of humanism and hope.
Salvage by Jennifer Mills
Picador, $34.99 pb, 448 pp
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