Punishment for subversive behaviour is having the speech centre in your brain destroyed. The secret that the regime is hiding, however, is that words can also be used to create things that don’t already exist, including freedom, a secret that some rebels (led by a poet, naturally) have begun to figure out. This means that the vocabulary is pared down to basics, stripped of metaphor or allusion. Every object has to be constantly labelled – “pencil”, “door”, “suitcase”, “factory” – and its name constantly spoken aloud – “pencil”, “door”, “suitcase”, “factory” – or else it will melt into a mysterious slimy gloop. The reason the authorities give for this strict control is the quite literal instability of the colonies. (There used to be five but one self-destructed.) The colonies are all tightly controlled by an authoritarian “committee” reminiscent of Stalinist or Maoist regimes.

The story takes place in a rather threadbare “empire” that consists of four town-sized colonies. It is an entertaining and provocative look at the importance of words and how language can shape reality. I just finished a dark and chilly example of the genre, Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka, which was published in Sweden four years ago and has just been translated into English by its author. Maybe it’s the uncertainty of our age and our ambivalence about technology -the way it both eases and controls our lives- but dystopian fiction seems to be very in vogue right now.

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck