fittest

A strain of science fiction has emerged lately, especially in Europe and more specifically France, that’s very sparing with visual effects and more dependent on tricks involving makeup and sets, sprinkled with a bit of body horror, à la David Cronenberg. French director Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom, which debuted in Cannes and played at the London film festival but has yet to open in the UK, is very much in this style, with genetically mutated people turning into animal-human hybrids – lizards, birds, all manner of…

“This is the essential problem. We can imagine the future. And once we’ve imagined it, we can’t stop.” These words appear towards the end of Naomi Alderman’s sixth novel, The Future, transcribed to a survivalist forum from a famous sermon by a doomsday cult leader who called himself Enoch. The Enochites came to a collective tragic end some years before the events of the novel, but Enoch’s ideas about the trajectory of human civilisation live on in corners of the internet, and resonate throughout the book as parable and…