Brave New Tempests

Brexit and Shakespeare’s Dystopian Afterlives in Ali Smith’s Gliff

Abstract

In the wake of Brexit, a surge of dystopian fiction by British authors has grappled with the political and cultural ruptures left in its trail. Ali Smith’s Gliff (2024) stands as a compelling recent addition to this post-Brexit corpus. Set in a near-future Britain governed by biometric surveillance and bureaucratic erasure, Gliff follows two non-binary siblings, Briar and Rose, who are categorised as “Unverifiables” after their mother refuses digital registration. One morning, a red line is painted around their house – a visible decree of exclusion – and their displacement begins. The novel probes a society stratified by data and language, where identity is state-sanctioned and deviation punished. By invoking Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Gliff joins a tradition of science-fictional adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that reworks the latter’s interrogations of knowledge, power, surveillance, and freedom within the speculative imaginaries of the twenty-first century.