Disnaeland by D.D. Johnston

(Barbican Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Dan Hartland

The late American comedian George Carlin once joked, “The planet is fine…the people are fucked!” When we speak of the end of the world, then, what we most often mean is the end of civilisation. It is of course a dangerously freighted word, carrying as it does a wide load of assumptions, prejudices and sins. This is the tension at the heart of D.D. Johnston’s Disnaeland, a novel narrated in an Anglicised version of the Scots dialect that focuses on the central Scottish town of Dundule in 2023—the year in which, in the alternative reality of this novel (and which, according to the author, is “just as real as our own”), the world ends.

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Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.