And here's that Bookstr article in full, since you asked:

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The Role of Literature in the Age of ‘Post-Truth’ and President Trump

by Paul Read

 

A reality TV star with no former political experience has been elected into the most powerful position on Earth. Where can fiction possibly go from here?

 

Readers understand that fictionalisation, the creation of stories out of common experience, requires the blurring of reality, whether it be a thinly-veiled autobiography passed off as a bildungsroman or the life of an author who used to be a secret service operative who merely changed the names of those concerned for the sake of anonymity. Writers, like politicians, have always mixed lies in amongst the truth to create the most palatable version of their story. From this shadowy world of half-truths and misinformation, of which we’re all complicit, we have arrived at a real life theatre of the absurd. Dystopian fiction is irrelevant now, isn’t it?

   Let’s look back, briefly, to the politically volatile 1930s. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published on the back of the rise of the perceived menace of communism, the new threat to the western world order, and concerns a world in which individualism and free-speech are repressed by the Central Authority and human beings have become mere clones. The book was released over ten years after We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, an exile from the Soviet Union, who nailed many of the to-be prevalent prototypes of dystopian fiction: the lack of privacy; the authoritarian distrust of emotion and personality; the replacement of individualism with homogenisation, of names with numbers. Towards the tail-end of the Second World War, George Orwell published Animal Farm as a reflection of events leading up to the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era. It was designed to show us how ridiculous real life had become. But his true warning came with 1949’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, a totalitarian cautionary tale famously concerning itself with Big Brother, thoughtcrime and Newspeak.

   Writers have always found inspiration from politics and societal injustice. I haven’t even touched upon Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report (amongst countless others of his) or Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, all of which, like the books mentioned above, or dystopias by Wells or Vonnegut or Ballard, share two major things in common. 

   Firstly, their worlds are frighteningly believable. They have taken their modern times, whenever they were and however they were alleged to be, and shown them Caliban’s ugly face in the mirror. They work so well because readers recognise the worlds hidden within the worlds. Sometimes, nothing ages as badly as contemporary predictions of the future (consider all those episodes of eighties sci-fi with guest stars clad in silvery costumes and compare them to their modern equivalents, in which the characters invariably wear modern dress and converse in an urban patois) but we can believe what we’re seeing or reading if we recognise or project ourselves into the fiction, if its characters, or plot developments, feel familiar. Dystopian literature, when it works, does so because it takes the present and uses the precepts of that familiar time to get the details, the human interactions, the reflections and ruminations right. All the writers I mentioned above understood, as Khaled Hosseini put it, that ‘writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies together to arrive at a greater truth’ but it could be equally valid to argue, too, that a series of truths can be weaved together to arrive at a greater lie, or fiction.

   Secondly, these authors refused to be muted. 

   When the President of the United States bans journalists, be they representatives of national or international broadcasting corporations, from future news conferences, he’ll likely discover that he hasn’t created a wall of silence. Quite the opposite will occur, especially in the age of social media in which the concept of ‘Post-truth’ is so well-known it became the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year (Donald Trump was Times’ Man of the Year: these two awards are not unrelated). If he embodies a type of political spin in which emotive, angry electioneering has replaced objective fact-checking and evidence then we can hardly be surprised if he, and ‘politicians’ like him, fear it used against them, even though, historically, when people of a social conscience get scared, they turn to their notebooks. The burning of books in Nazi Germany was the ultimate attempt to purge free-thought, subversion and liberalism, and it didn’t work. Will we be seeing an array of works featuring the notion of fake news, distrust of the political elite and demagogues over the next four years in retaliation? The signs are that we will. 

   It will take time for the books to emerge but 2017 is already showing signs of trying to understand, in a literary sense, the traumatic events of 2016. Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie, will focus on two British Muslim families questioning their loyalty to the state in the wake of the country’s EU Referendum vote. 59, by Attica Locke, will deal with the American south and the strained relations between police officers and their black and white communities. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck is set to explore the refugee crisis in modern day Berlin. Gnomon, Nick Harkaway’s near-future dystopia, will detail a ‘perfect’ society which keeps its citizens under surveillance by The System, which may or may not share parallels with Will Self’s new novel, Phone, being billed as a satire on our contemporary, digitally-plugged-in world. Perhaps most intriguing of all is Douglas Board’s Time of Lies, set around a 2020 general election in which a right-wing demagogue with a hard-core following of young thugs is staging an anti-elite coup. 

   Literature will not ignore what happened last year, that much will become clear. Hacking claims; sordid personal fetishes; nepotism; accusations of falsity; the leaking of intelligence reports; the whipping up of the downtrodden masses into a xenophobic frenzy in order to facilitate political earthquakes: we’ve seen it all before. The only difference is that 2016 delivered all of this not only in the same twelve months but via news outlets rather than the bookshop. The ‘post-truth’ world, in which facts are discredited and blatant lies are shouted over them, is already a familiar one to readers of novels. 2017’s real challenge, and beyond, will be in making fiction sound remotely credible in the face of all that occurred the year before.