Reading List
Slavoj Žižek
Philosopher and Cultural Critic
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic who reads Hegel and Lacan through Hitchcock, and whose books on ideology have made him one of the few living philosophers with a genuinely popular audience. He works at the University of Ljubljana and Birkbeck, and writes at a pace that alarms his critics. He is a serious reader of science fiction, treating the genre as the place where political imagination is currently done.
01
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I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman
“Perhaps even darker is this novel about a girl and 39 women held prisoner in a bunker. When the male guards flee, the captives emerge into a barren plain, and the girl, the last to survive, writes about her life. Existentially, I feel like the girl: Even in a crowd, I am totally alone. My words will probably never reach their addressee, someone who will read them properly.” — Source, May 2026
02
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The Three-Body Problem
by Liu Cixin · 2014 · Fiction
“In Liu's masterpiece, Earth is confronted with a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. I see it as Earth in the near future: Are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is "the end of nature"?” — Source, May 2026
03
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The Ministry for the Future
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 2020
“Socialist realism at its most noble and convincing. In the near future, a global heat wave that begins in India kills millions and spreads around the world. But humans decide on cooperation and gradually cope with the threat.” — Source, May 2026
04
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The Drowned World
by J. G. Ballard · 1962
“Ballard depicts a postapocalyptic future in which global warming has rendered much of the planet uninhabitable. In a flooded London, several characters take advantage of societal collapse to fulfill unconscious urges. The idea that a mega catastrophe could create an opportunity to experience jouissance—surrender to bliss—profoundly influenced me.” — Source, May 2026