“German SF Novelists compete with reality to describe how life in the UK could be about to change.”
“Although Margaret Thatcher is by now only vaguely remembered as an “English separatist from the 20th century”, the joke for anyone reading Tom Hillenbrand’s SF thriller Drone State now is that Brexit still hasn’t happened.”
“One basic rule of dystopian fiction is that the future should be worse than the present,” said the German novelist. “But in this case it turns out I was a bit too optimistic.”
“In my book Britain has actually worked out how it wants to leave and the EU is preparing a new constitution as a result. The real Brexit is actually much more dystopian.”
Since Drone State was published in Germany to critical acclaim in 2014, two years before the EU referendum on EU membership, a new micro-genre has flourished in Germany’s publishing industry: dystopian fiction about Brexit Britain.”
“This April there was the publication of GRM: Brainfuck by the acclaimed German-Swiss author and playwright Sibylle Berg, whose black-humoured novel starts in Rochdale around 2010 and ends in a dystopian London of the near future.”
“In May came The Shelter, written by Regine Bott under the pseudonym Kris Brynn, which imagines an English state trying to stem the spread of an antibiotic-resistant disease by dividing survivors into a strict tripartite class system with tiered access to healthcare.”
“Tom Hillenbrand followed up Drone State last year with Hologrammatica, a hard-boiled thriller that provides some comfort to Leave voters: by 2088, England has definitely left EURUS, the recently joined federations of Europe and Russia.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/30/german-scifi-fans-reading-dystopia-brexit-britain
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