Tag: dystopia
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Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
B.F. Skinner has some terrible ideas about utopia. They make for incredible reading, just not in the way he intended
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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Breathtaking. Literally: there were several times while reading this I realized I was holding my breath. Lynch’s book details a modern Ireland’s quick slide into a nightmare dystopia. It sees the world through the eyes of a mother trying to figure out how to keep her family together. It’s easily one of the top five…
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The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
This was very close to a William Gibson novel (there’s even a character named Case, which is surely a callback to Neuromancer). It’s a rough book to start – the world is fully formed and a lot is left to the reader to figure out – slang, political alignments, technology and recent history for example…
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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
What made the original trilogy work so well, even when the story started to fall apart in the end, was momentum. They were sparse, aggressively paced books that were very hard to put down. That was missing here. Every time I felt like the story was about to blast off, it stopped dead. There were…
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The Marriage Act by John Marrs
This guy has so many interesting ideas. It’s a bit of a shame that he’s not writing short stories rather than full-length novels. His ‘20 minutes into the future‘ style dystopias are fascinating. My biggest criticism is that so many of them aren’t explored outside of set-dressing. The story itself is kind of fun —…
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We by Yevgeny Zemyatin
It’s surprising how long a shadow this book casts. I haven’t read 1984 or Anthem in a long time but both of them came back to me clearly while reading this. And it feels a lot less like homework than Brave New World. It’s also much more interesting coming from the perspective of a Russian…