Novels of the Future | Aaron Matz, Willa Glickman
“Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire,” writes Aaron Matz, quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, in a review of Dan Sperrin’s State of Ridicule from our March 26, 2026, issue. Unfortunately, literary political satire has been in a long period of decline—and not just because it has been supplanted by faster and more attention-grabbing forms of media in our screen-addled age. Sperrin argues that satire—at least the grand tradition of English political satire, the focus of his book—hasn’t been the same since the late eighteenth century, when state affairs became too complex to effectively mock, and English society, struggling to maintain its cohesion, became less tolerant of withering critique. Matz finds that a more significant factor was the development of mass culture. “There was now simply too much to puncture, the zone of power had far exceeded machinations in government, and a satire on politics could no longer leave out the vast arena of society,” he writes. “The boundary between the two had become too porous.” Matz, a professor …
