Kazuo Ishiguro’s Suffering Servants

We live in a golden age of dystopia. From Snowpiercer to The Handmaid’s Tale, from Watchmen to The Walking Dead, we flit between the nightmare of total social control and the chaos of total civilizational collapse, or somehow face both terrors at once. Most of the time, these stories present fantasies of survival and resistance rather than delivering the true work of the genre, which is to show us not only who we already are but how indefinitely sustainable our horrors might be, precisely because they spring not from some sinister cabal or scheme but from the very nature of our humanity.