Hello and welcome to Everything Else, the Culture podcast from The Financial Times.

That was John and I'm Griselda and on this week's episode we're going to be talking about why

dystopian fiction is booming again and what exactly it says about the world we live in.

We'll also hear from the artist Comrade Shawcross. He finds beauty

in machines and his works pay homage to inventors, mathematicians and scientific pioneers.

Oh my God, welcome to the dystopian podcast and my mug of tea has the word workday customer 1309 on it.

Yeah, it looks like a sort of standard issue prison mug.

Oh, it's been a very odd week.

It's been a strange week.

Yeah, our officers are in London Bridge pretty much,

just around the corner from where the terrorist attack happened.

All the roads are cordoned off around where we work.

So pretty bleak.

And we're also just recording this before the general election takes place.

We live in pretty strange times.

I think everyone's agreed.

So we decided this week to kind of tackle this head on to think about the times we live

in and how our times are reflected in the kind of art and the kind of books that we're consuming,

what we're watching on TV and what all of this stuff says about our world.

When we kind of put the feelers out to people to come into the podcast, dystopian fiction is at the top of people's minds and also the Handmaid's Tale is kind

of dominating most people's chat about TV at the moment.

It's a Hulu original adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale starring

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