My Addiction to Dystopias

Cho Nam-Joo’s novel 'Saha', and the promise of feeling prepared

News & Reviews Magazine

This article is part of our March edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!

The piece you’re reading now is by Astrid Edwards. Astrid is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing and has interviewed more than 200 of Australia’s most prominent writers and publishers. She is a teacher in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University and sometimes judges literary prizes, including the 2023 Stella Prize. In 2023 she began a PhD at the University of Melbourne exploring potential and perceived barriers to publishing and selling climate fiction in Australia. In 2021 Astrid contributed to the anthology Growing Up Disabled in Australia and made her debut appearance on Q+A in 2021.

Astrid writes for News & Reviews Magazine every month. These are her last pieces from previous editions:

The Cost of This Housing Crisis

Astrid Has Strong Opinions About the New Novels from Jesmyn Ward and Melissa Broder

The Meanjin That Might Have Been

Love in the Time of Colonisation

Do you feel it too? It is a quiet thought, a suspicion I cannot quash. Sometimes it bubbles up as fear. I think some of us are going to witness one of those vicious arcs of history that do not bend towards justice but rather snap violently into chaos.

I can’t hide this fear. A bookseller from Paperback Bookshop in Melbourne recently upsold me Cho Nam-Joo’s novel Saha, which I confess I had not heard of. I like to think I would have been open to any recommendation, but that isn’t the entire truth. I am at a point in my life—and in the Anthropocene—where I am compelled to read fiction that interrogates what may happen when history snaps. It relieves the pressure of that fear bubbling inside me. It feels cathartic.

Saha hit the spot. I got mad then I cried and then I felt a little better, just for a bit. This is not an uplifting novel, but the emotional arc it took me on was close to perfect.

The Saha Estates, referred to as simply ‘Saha’, are a decaying apartment complex on the outskirts of ‘Town’, the capital of a privatised city state somewhere in Asia. Town is the epitome of late-stage capitalism–everything is on the market, commodified and consumable, including people. Town is a surveillance state and individuals exist within a social credit system. Saha, outside that system, is home to the undocumented, those who did not work for the corporation, and everyone who has fallen through the cracks.