This week, we turn the page from Afro-Futurism to the Dawn of Dystopia, where we’ll be featuring a barrage of foundational works from the apocalyptic annals of sci-fi’s doom-drenched history, and starting us off is this brazen Brazilian novel set in a nightmarish future all-too-close to our own.

The cities smell like corpses, forests turn to deserts, poverty hollows out the stomachs of the citizenry, the water supply is running out, pandemics rival sterilization programs to eradicate the future, and a totalitarian regime uses climate disasters to enact its fascist agenda … São Paulo native Ignacio De Loyola Brandao’s And Still the Earth pitches his hometown against this grim backdrop inspired by the real-life military junta that subjugated Brazil 1964-1885.

The story revolves around Souza, a middle-aged former professor whose uneventful life of domestic boredom and government servitude are upended upon losing his cubicle job and finding that his wife of 32 years has gone missing. Utilizing flashbacks to his formative years and a bleak stream-of-consciousness narration, Souza attempts to recollect his fading memories while slowly becoming aware of the true scope of his own indoctrination and oppression.

Published in 1981, only a few years after his landmark novel Zero was banned by the dictatorship, the dogged Brandao never relented in his crusade against the brutal regime. Written in a diaristic style that reflects the fracturing consciousness of a radicalizing dissident, Brandao’s prophetic and often-filthy writing puts us right in the bowels of a familiar wasteland.