“Unlike straight satire, which exposes an era’s triumphs as its defects, dystopic science fictions imagine the rise of such defects to dominate a future that’s even further along in its accomplishments (and ruin) than the past that birthed it. Such novels matter to the extent that they are capable of effecting shocks of recognition about worlds only partway distant from our own.”

– (Randy Boyagoda in The Walrus magazine, on Michel Houellebecq)