Across his oeuvre, Ishiguro has imaginatively reworked a host of literary and artistic genres, from the debts to the gothic tradition in A Pale View of Hills to the science fiction thematics of Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. At the same time, he has expressed ambivalence and even hostility towards the genres his novels draw on, prompting polemical responses from such influential writers of genre fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. This chapter sheds light on Ishiguro’s distinctively equivocal relation to genre fiction by examining how his four most recent novels self-consciously engage with and exploit the genres of detective, dystopian, fantasy, and science fiction.

We live in Orwellian times. We have also lived through, and continue to live in, an age of post-Orwellian novels. Books by writers as varied as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Cory Doctorow, Dave Eggers, Maggie Gee, Ursula Le Guin, Michel Houellebecq, and Will Self, not to mention Suzanne Collins, Patrick Ness, and Veronica Roth, among numerous others, attest to the influence Nineteen Eighty-Four has exerted, and still exerts, on the literary imagination. This chapter considers the creative legacy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, looking at how writers have appropriated and adapted the literary form of Orwell’s text, and how they have responded to its visions of surveillance, state power, and erasure of identity. This chapter thus considers the status Orwell’s novel holds in the twenty-first century as a formative influence on the dystopian genre and as a text that continues to shape the way in which authors address the anxieties of their own times.