Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead.

I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings.

Anything requested and approved will be read and a decent quality review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I have been trying to catch up on all of these books that were on my shelf for so long and I decided to give this one a go. I got through the first 2 stories, and they were okay. Then the depression started to set in. I guess life in the last year has felt so much like a dystopian nightmare that maybe dystopian stories are not what I need right now. No disrespect to the authors,
I'm sure they're all very creative and imaginative. I just could not finish this book.
1 star (DNF)

This got lost in my Kindle, but actually got found in a rather timely manner! I love when stories predict the future! This is so right for reading this year with politics being even more eventful then I can ever remember, and the virus and everything else going on. This book is filled with lots of entertaining short stories (my favorites). I am sure many readers will find it an incredible read! Have fun!

OR Books rarely puts out a bad title, and as such, this is a good book. It's not a particularly uplifting book, but it might be the right book for motivating you to actually do something with your time!

Welcome to Dystopia is a collection of 45 dystopian short stories that are dark, politically charged, and unsettling

I rarely read short stories because they almost always leave me wanting more. It's hard for me to resist dystopia, however, so I had to see what this collection had to offer.

In case the title didn't give readers a hint, the editor makes it plain that the current U.S. president served as inspiration for this anthology and the stories within it. That may dissuade some people from reading this book, but others will probably find it quite interesting.

Each story is set in the near future, and the way in which things have changed for the worse vary. No story has a happy ending, and each of them is chilling in its own way.

Some of the stories I liked best:

♋ by N. Lee Wood
Two women with cancer have extremely different experiences with their cancer treatment. One lives in New Zealand, the other lives in the U.S.)

The Terrific Leader by Harry Turtledove
Despite freezing and scrounging for edibles in the snow to stave off starvation, a girl eagerly looks forward to tuning in to one of the government-mandated channels to hear the Terrific Leader speak about how great everything is, was, and always will be.

Newsletter by Jennifer Marie Brissett
A bookstore owner warns patrons to keep certain books in a safe place, and that their book orders are being monitored.

We All Have Hearts of Gold© by Leo Vladimirsky
An advertising agency is tasked with selling the public on the Goldshirts, an enforcer group that "makes America safe again", as a good thing.

Dangerous by Lisa Mason
Vaginas are dangerous and must be registered with the government.

Designed for Your Safety by Elizabeth Bourne
A high-tech building goes into lock-down mode, trapping employees, who are desperate to get out despite a deadly illness infecting people outside.

While I liked some stories more than others, the book as a whole was unputdownable for me. Anything having to do with politics is a particularly touchy subject these days, so I'll recommend this book to open-minded readers who love dystopia.

I received an advance reading copy of this book courtesy of OR Books via Netgalley.

I am a complete sucker for dystopian literature, and for short stories, so a combination of the two should be perfect for me.
Unfortunately these stories aren't really *my* type of dystopia. They're (mainly) all a bit too close to the present and, quite frankly, too American. It's like blinkers are on for every author and none can see past their own country and the absolute shitstorm they're in (I'm British, we're in our own political shotstorm here). I like to read for escapism, not to be reminded of the reality and too possible scenarios that could occur.
Some stories were excellent however, really well-thought out and engaging. Others were not so good, and one even used 'of' in place of 'have' - something that seriously pisses me off anyway when it's spoken, but to see an author use it in their writing is ridiculous and should have been noticed by the editing team.
The anthology itself is a tad too long and with too many stories that are either not very well written, unoriginal or not engaging at all, which really brings the general collection down. This could be a good collection for those who don't read much dystopia, but for hardcore fans, probably best to give it a miss.

It is a universally acknowledged fact that I LOVE dystopias, so I was ecstatic when I got an ARC of this anthology of dystopian tales from NetGalley!

I really liked a few but some of them were a disappointment- the characters felt meh and the plot wasn't very engaging. Therefore I lost interest quickly. However, maybe I might come back to them and may change my mind later- we shall see!

Welcome to Dystopia is a selection of stories by various writers about the horrors that await us in the near and far future. I really liked the amount of short stories in this book...in the intro, the editor says he chose shorter ones deliberately and I think it was a good idea.
I love a good dystopia and some of these stories were really good. The one page tale of random executions in a train stati on that avoids racial profiling was brutal and brilliant. "Newsletter" was a heartbreaking story for any book lover. And there were two stories about women emailing each other which were quite powerful too.
There is a a lot of variety in these stories but there are some over arching themes and ideas that crop up a lot...immigration, Trump, closing borders. I think it's interesting to see how our ideas of dystopia have changed since Trump, but I thought some of the stories were a little heavy handed with the topics. A little too on the nose with the references to slogans and red hats. I know that this shows the general feeling on the ground, but for me personally it was a bit too much and too often for my tastes.
This book is not for the faint heart or for anyone who needs cheering up...it is relentless horror of our future. Generally, I love this topic! But, as I said, there were certain references that kept cropping up that I got a little bored with. Great for fans of the genre though and worth a look.

I usually love dystopias but this collection was very repetitive & not very engaging. They read too much like real life in the not-too-distant future and many showed a lack of imagination. I powered through to finish this book but it was a hard slog as there were so many stories that just didn’t feel developed enough.

I think the word dystopia is a bit of a stretch for this book. The definition of dystopia is a "utopia" gone awry. This book is a more a collection of stories that are one step away from being true, in very scary ways.

When evaluating a short story collection, I look for three things - 1. Are there stories that move me? 2. Are there more stories I enjoy than that I do not enjoy? 3. Can I read multiple stories in a sitting?

There are absolutely some gems in this collection. I did find that I couldn't read too many stories in a sitting, however, since they were all similar enough that it got to be too much. On their own, most were in the category of stories that move me.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

dnf @ 38%

i don't like leaving books unfinished, especially i feel bad doing so with arcs, but at this point in my life my time is valuable, and i just can't keep pretending like i give a damn about this book anymore.

anthologies are interesting because they contain many different stories tied together by some vague topic. this anthology read like a collection of stories from one specific near-future world. i never felt like i was reading fiction: the stories lacked symbolism and resembled most recent news articles, or friday night news scripts. having only read less than a half of the book, i feel bored with every single story that comes after, because i can already predict the tone, time and place of the story, and that's failure to me. i just really don't feel like going on. if this was any other type of dystopia, i might have considered sacrificing a few more days, but this heavily political collection is not entirely catering to my tastes at all, so unfortunately i'll have to pass.

It’s very hard to do Trump-adjacent dystopia without either doing nothing more than reporting or seeming cartoonish, or both. The more successful stories tend to reach beyond ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios. Janis Ian’s story of a white woman who fetishizes the Mexican workers forced to labor in her family’s fields was the most disturbing—it feels accurate about how sexuality can relate to racism but it is dystopic so it may not be something everyone is ready to read. Deji Bryce Olukotun’s The Levellers is about ecological levellers with politics that are not standard left or right and thus is more thought-provoking/speculative than many of the other immigration-focused stories. Mary Anne Mohranaj’s Farewell is the best of the human immigration-focused stories, though it isn’t particularly fictional or speculative (it’s about denaturalization of naturalized nonwhites). J.S. Breukelaar’s Glow is an immigration story with a difference, about aliens and humans and the thin skin between. Harry Turtledove’s and Barry Malzberg’s stories are cartoonish; sadly, Yoon Ha Lee’s is as well, and Jane Yolen’s poem; Geoff Ryman’s story from the perspective of a sexist whose wife likes liberal North California better than the guns-and-guns republic in the south is the same. Ray Vukevich’s story about ritualized humiliation of female resistance is the best of the cartoonish/satirical ones—it manages to insert genuine menace and an understanding of what makes people complicit in oppression even when they say to themselves that they disagree.

When you love dystopian fiction it’s tough to resist a book that literally welcomes you to it. But then again maybe it would have been smart to exercise some caution…because this isn’t quite the sort of dystopia I enjoy. For one thing it’s set predominantly in near present or immediate future. For another it’s all one note, one theme…a nightmarish interpretation of the current US politics

ARC Copy...very much understand why today's political landscape would be a fountain of inspiration for dystopia + felt disturbing in good story way but felt overkill saturation/too many to the point multiple stories felt like the same stories over and over again plus it felt the general anthology was going to be very outdated in a short amount of time. Some of the stories I did like as favorites, for example Yolen's beautiful if bold poem and a high-tech building goes wrong felt current yet will probably last awhile in the long run.

I was really disappointed in this collection. I feel like dystopias are now too over done and so every story was just cliche and stolen story line. Not for me unfortunately

If you enjoy far left- wing propaganda set in very short stories this book is for you! I gave one star because the stories are at least spelled correctly.

Although the majority of stories are America-centric the themes that are in them can be relate-able for all of us. I've read a lot of the reviews and disagree with them.
I found these stories haunting, thought-provoking and quite honestly terrifying.
They are written by people who disagree with Trump's policies or, at least, can see inherent danger in his actions. The short stories have many themes from data protection all the way through to martial law and I found them fascinating. You can see the thought process or many of the writers and the fact that those scenarios are not too far fetched is what is truly scary.

I am sorry to say that I was nonplussed by this offering, as the stories were hit or miss for me. I get the idea dystopia and near-future, but usually it is more than 3 years out. While there were a few gems among the assorted texts, the majority seemed to be a critique against the current presidential administration. Whether or not one is a fan of the actions of the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, we read science fiction to escape, if only briefly, the troubles of the modern day. Again, some people did stand out as pieces worthy of respect and appreciation in their own right, but not enough to make the whole volume engaging.

Dark and witty and smart and depressing stories about a future in which technology controls just about everything, and anything can be done to you, or your friends, or the planet, by technology. The theme is, of course, dystopia, but while the stories are individually mostly good reads, the collection as a whole starts to feel rather Luddite in nature about a third of the way through. The writing throughout is solid, but the repetitiveness of similar ideas dulls.

While this collection of short stories clearly has a political message, their approach does show the level of concern at the route society seems to be taking. While some of the stories do seem to fit the idea of propaganda at times, it is worth reading through the anthology to find the thoughtful and thought-provoking stories that address the core concerns of society, no matter the political party in power. Some of the stories are so short they are over before they really start, yet some of these also provide great opportunities for reflection. If you are a fan of dystopian fiction, it is worth exploring.