The works summarized in this section were selected to provide a
representative sampling of the wide range of dystopian fictions that
have been produced by writers in various countries around the world
in the past century or so. These countries include England, France,
Germany, Canada, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Russia
and the Soviet Union, and Somalia. The texts summarized include
works of science fiction, relatively conventional satires, modernist and
postmodernist experimental texts, and texts written in conventional
realistic modes. While this sampling of dystopian fictions is by no
means comprehensive, the range in geographies, styles, and subjects
spanned by these texts indicates the diversity of modern dystopian
fiction and the quite broad way dystopian fiction appears to resonate
with the mind set of modern writers from a variety of cultures around
the world.

Kobo Abé, whose work has sometimes been compared with that of
Franz Kafka, is one of Japan's leading contemporary writers. His
Inter Ice Age 4, which mixes the "popular" genres of science fiction
and detective fiction, is an extremely thoughtful speculative work that
convincingly demonstrates the ability of "popular" literary genres to
participate in serious philosophical debates. In the book Japanese

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