London in Fiction - Nightmare City

What this episode covers

Many novels have portrayed London as a city beset by profound problems, often with memorable and disturbing accounts of a dystopian future. Cathi Unsworth unravels Derek Raymond's A State of Denmark and its dark satiric tale of a journalist in exile from a British dictatorship and a country living under government propaganda and spin, China Miéville introduces J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World in which the city is succumbing to global warming and rising water levels, and Iain Sinclair explores the energetic and insane sequences of London trajectories in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's London Bridge. The discussion was chaired by Andrew Whitehead. The London in Fiction series is organised in collaboration with London Fictions, a website exploring representations of the city in fiction.

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