The impersonal clatter and sensual throb of an urban dystopia - "where everybody's heading, but where nobody belongs" - drive the music of Moonshake, an English band that performed on Sunday night at the Mercury Lounge.

Metropolis (1927): Fritz Lang's film, set in a futuristic urban dystopia, features a female robot brought to life by a mad scientist.

The songs are centred around the poetic lyrics of vocalist Clinton St. John, and are lyrical stories of urban dystopia and a culture on the brink.

But the Morris and its horizontal swath of green facets made me long to see it next to one of Ed Paschke's acrid masklike faces, with their horizontal pulls of pure color, exacerbating the undercurrent of urban dystopia that separates the Morris from the Stella.

Coval also comments on the rapper's vignettes of inner-city life, which are depicted using elaborate rhyme structures: "All the words, faces and bodies of an abandoned post-industrial, urban dystopia are framed in Nas's tightly packed stanzas.

The writer, William Gibson, struck a chord with his vision of a dark, computerized future filled with ultrafast data networks and populated by technologically adept, low-life hustlers living in an urban dystopia called The Sprawl.

In Veronica Roth's first novel, an urban dystopia is divided into five factions, each guided by a particular virtue.

Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, and Maria, whose background is not fully explained in the film, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classist nature of their city.

The city is a filthy, polluted urban dystopia.