Imagine it. A dystopian government maintains power over the downtrodden population of a post-apocalyptic United States through a system of deadly games. Exposure to a strange new element gives an average young man superstrength. Invisible predators from an alternate dimension feed on human evil. A hardy young adventurer forges telepathic connections with a living world to oppose the forces that would brutally exploit them both. And then there are realities that turn out to be nothing more than mere illusions, the projections of angry and excited minds—or just perhaps, a nagging voice inside us insists, they might be real after all….
These are the dreams that contemporary culture is made of, fueling everything from Hollywood blockbusters to groundbreaking video games and prize-winning literary experiments. And, incredibly, they are all story forms popularized by pioneering genre author Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett, who wrote (primarily under the pen name Francis Stevens) in the first decades of the twentieth century.
People generally don’t confuse the sounds of singing and talking. That may seem obvious. But it’s actually quite impressive—particularly when you consider that we are usually confident that we can discern between the two even when we encounter a language or musical genre that we’ve never heard before. How exactly does the human brain so effortlessly and instantaneously make such judgments?
Alam’s writing is never more brilliant than when it ridicules corporate America. “Men in business casual” swarm, “common as pigeons”. While Brooke argues the importance of the arts in children’s education to Asher, he listens seriously, for “just as he’d not thought about the rights of gays to marry one another until last year, he’d never before considered the question of finger paint”. Such wryness serves Entitlement well, solidifying it as the sort of shrewd, propulsive read the word “zeitgeisty” ought to be reserved for.
Shane knows that her descriptions of sex work might be used as proof of the job’s perceived harms—the way it is said to subordinate women to their sexuality or commodify what should only ever be given for free—but she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to form a straightforward defense. Instead, Shane uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not.