LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

dystopia

  1. Events
  2. dystopia

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Eric Barnes

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In Above the Ether (Arcade), the prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel, The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change. While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken — a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails — until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm. A mesmerizing novel of unfolding dystopia amid the effects of climate change…

Continue readingEric Barnes
Free

Reading: Punch Doubt in the Face by Nicolle Merrill

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Will robots take our jobs? Will algorithms become our managers? Nobody really knows for sure. But you're invited to speculate about it with local author Nicolle Merrill as she hosts an interactive reading of her new book, Punch Doubt in the Face: How to upskill, change careers, and beat the robots. Punch Doubt is a nonfiction career advice book about our new world of work with a twist: the book contains a choose-your-own-adventure style story set in a dystopian workplace. Join Nicolle as she reads the interactive story from her book and asks the audience to choose which path to take. You can learn more about Nicolle and her new book for career changers here.

Free

Attic Institute: WINTER Online: Fairytales, Myth, and Dystopia: A Fiction Workshop w Elinam Agbo | Feb 16 – Mar 16

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Snow White. The Round Table. Persephone and Hades. From hybrid prose to web comics and blockbusters, fairy tales and legends are constantly retold across mediums. Why do we continue to relate? How do they help us find meaning in uncertain times? What can we borrow from these forms to examine the past and future in light of climate change, migration, and capitalism? In this course, we will study writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Joy Williams. Then we will begin our own stories, inspired by existing lore. If you are drawn to cross-cultural myths, obscure tales, or the idea of Rapunzel on Mars, this is the class for you. Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic,…

Continue readingAttic Institute: WINTER Online: Fairytales, Myth, and Dystopia: A Fiction Workshop w Elinam Agbo | Feb 16 – Mar 16
$215 – $242

Delve Readers Seminar: Dystopias of Turkish Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Bilge Karasu’s Night

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This Delve seminar looks at two acclaimed authors of modern Turkish literature and their dystopian novels, The Black Book and Night. Dystopian narratives portray oppressive systems, and they display a deep suspicion of power structures and their alliance with scientific progress and technology. Published in 1985 in the aftermath of a brutal military coup in Turkey, Night depicts a violent secretive regime set out to murder its dissidents. Dystopian imagery of an unnamed city is permeated with dismembered bodies, silence, and angst. Reminiscent of Kafka’s works, Night raises the question of the relationship between power and justice. The multiple narrators of Night with their ever-shifting identities leave the reader with a profound sense of uncertainty. In a similar vein to Night, The Black Book (1990),…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Dystopias of Turkish Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Bilge Karasu’s Night
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Many of us have described the past year as “apocalyptic” or “dystopian.” We’ve been living through a global pandemic, a critical presidential election, ravaging wildfires, and a national reckoning with our country’s legacy of racism and police violence. Utopic and dystopic fiction can help us make sense of our experience and ask questions about our future. In this seminar we’ll read three works of utopic and dystopic fiction written by women authors. In our reading and discussion of each text, we will focus on a few core questions: Who are we, as a society? Who do we want to be? What gets in the way of becoming the society we dream of? What do fictional dystopias and utopias teach us about what we fear and…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction
$240

Reading: Mia V. Moss & the Arcaneers

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Local weird fiction publisher Underland Press is delighted to publish Mia V. Moss's debut novella, Mai Tais for the Lost, a dystopian under the sea crime story about family, debts, and GMO octopuses. She'll be joined by a rogues gallery of Underland Arcana writers, who will be on hand to help celebrate Moss's debut.

Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.