Dislocation, Dismemberment, Dystopia: From Cyberpunk to the Fiction of Wendell Berry and Ann Pancake

Wendell Berry’s Remembering (1988) and Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been (2007) offer examples of a contemporary discourse on dislocation and dismemberment generally more characteristic of dystopian speculative fiction (SF). In the case of Berry’s and Pancake’s works, this common SF theme is applied to regional, non-speculative novels about the marginalization of rural places for the sake of industrial agriculture and the economics of extraction. In each of these novels, as in SF like Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s graphic novel Hard Boiled (1990-92), bodily dismemberment reflects a larger sense of displacement and environmental devastation resulting from commercial exploitation of people and the places in which they work and live.