Heather Nielsen

to join the army and being sent to Vietnam.

And so he calls it a fictionalised memoir.

It has a narrator who bears the author's name and is clearly, to some extent, based on his own experiences, but embellished, so on.

And the other thing I have been reading, although that is a more academic one really for teaching, but again very relevant to the current situation, is a great big weighty tome

of history called American Empire, a Global History by A.G.

Hopkins.

That came out in 2018 and so I actually run a course at UNSW Canberra called American Empire.

You know, as well as fiction and film, you want something to tell people about the context of American Empire or even that question of is the United States still an empire?

Was it an empire?

So those are the kinds of considerations that

Yes, I haven't read the book you've just been talking about, The Last Good Man, but it's clearly got some echoes and resonances with other things that we are familiar with, even such as 1984.

Yes, I was thinking of 1984 very much.

Yes, but the other book that I keep coming back to as I'm listening to you and also I'm thinking about Homeland Elegies is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which is both a kind of alternative history about what would have happened had America

the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh being elected president in 1940.

But it also, to that extent, it really is a dystopia because it's imagined from the perspective of a Jewish family who find themselves more and more scapegoated and feared.

And so what you've been talking about is dystopia and its representation of fear.

And I suppose for me, a simplistic definition of

Dystopian literature has always been at its premises in forced conformity, people being scapegoated, regarded with suspicion and fear, as George was saying, being a kind of predominant aspect of this.

So there's a lot of crossover between some of these works, these alternate histories, these speculative fictions and science fiction and dystopia.

There's often a bit of overlap there.