Live Radio With Harrsion Hickman

The Everchanging Face of Dystopian Fiction In the Summer of 2017, I hosted an event called Sci-Fi and Dystopia: The Same? in Edinburgh. Things were organised at the last minute, so I didn’t expect that many people to attend. However, several people did turn up and I invited them to join me for lunch in a pub afterwards. Over a meal of rapidly cooked food and Edinburgh Castle Ale, we continued the conversation from the event and ended up delving into the depths of what dystopian literature actually is. After the lunch broke up, I found myself thinking deeply about a novel I’d just started working on, Set In Stone. It was, to say the least, controversial. Indeed, a friend of mine at a writer’s group in Glasgow I was a member of advised me not to write it. I’ve never been the one to shy away and became increasingly curious about pressing on and hopefully getting the book released. When it finally came out in 2019, it had a fairly mixed reception. Some people loved it, others loathed it.