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veritasnoctis
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Dec 2007
Posts: 31
Location: Bellevue, NE
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 Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 12:28 am Post subject: What are the "Must Read" Dystopias? |
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Amy Sturgis, over at the Liberty & Power group blog, posted this list and posed the above question. What do you think?
| Quote: | "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster (1909)
The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells (1910)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (1937)
Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
1984 by George Orwell (1949)
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949)
Gather, Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1950)
Limbo by Bernard Wolfe (1952)
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (1952/1953)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (1960)
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
334 by Thomas Disch (1972)
The Dispossessed bu Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
The Gate to Women's Country by Sherri S. Tepper (1988)
Children of Men by P.D. James (1992)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)
Feed by M.T. Anderson (2002)
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2004)
(Note: I'm not counting disaster/post-apocalyptic novels that focus more on the disaster/apocalyptic event than on the world that follows it.) |
_________________
Yours in liberty,
Geoffrey Allan Plauche
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
("Who watches the watchmen?")
-Juvenal, Satires VI.347
Last edited by veritasnoctis on Tue May 20, 2008 1:28 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Liege-Killer
Joined: 12 May 2008
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 4:57 pm Post subject: |
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I'm embarrassed to say there's only one novel on that list that I've read (that being The Dispossessed).
But there are quite a few there that I plan to read. In particular, The Space Merchants, The Chrysalids, 334, The Shockwave Rider, and A Canticle for Liebowitz have all been on my to-get list for a while.
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wombatron
Joined: 22 Feb 2008
Posts: 16
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| Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 6:38 pm Post subject: |
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Looks good, although I would protest Snow Crash being considered a dystopia; it certainly seems like an improvement on the current situation! 
_________________
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." --Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
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veritasnoctis
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Dec 2007
Posts: 31
Location: Bellevue, NE
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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I haven't read many of them either.
I haven't read Children of Men, but I watched the movie and reviewed it.
| Quote: |
I'm finally getting around to reviewing a movie I saw for the first time on dvd a couple of weeks ago. I'll keep this brief. Children of Men was an interesting dystopian film set in a near-future fascist Britain. The country has traded freedom for "security," has closed its borders to immigrants and systematically rounds them up into concentration camps and deports or exterminates them. It is a world beset by terrorism, of the Islamic fundamentalist variety and others.
The premise of the movie, however, is such a stretch that it makes it hard for one to maintain adequate suspension of disbelief. Suddenly and inexplicably over very short span of time (a few years maybe?) the entire female sex of the human race becomes infertile. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, a group of resistance fighters discovers a pregnant woman. Much of the movie is their attempt to smuggle her out of the country.
Though the premise is rather far-fetched, the movie makes interesting use of it for social analysis. With no possibility of children, the extinction of the human race is not far off. Hope for the future seems lost. What effect will this loss of hope have on individuals and on society as a whole? The movie does a good job of dramatizing this on both levels.
There is nothing especially libertarian about the movie aside from its depiction of fascism. Even the resistance group, or at least certain members of it, can be rather brutal and extreme. The movie has a distinctly British/European sensibility, or so I thought. And though very dark, it does end with a weak and vague ray of hope. The hope, however, is a rather collectivist hope for humanity as a species. There is not much for individuals currently living during the time of the movie to look forward to, but at least the human race just might survive a little longer, provided we can get our act together.
I did enjoy the movie, and the main actors turned out good performances. Clive Owen. Julianne Moore. I was happy to see Chiwetel Ejiofor, who did such a wonderful job as the chilling government assassin in Serenity, as one of the resistance fighters; and he turned out a fine performance here as well. Given the caveats above, however, I was not especially moved by the movie, nor did I fall in love with it. Watching one of the documentaries included on the dvd kind of soured the movie for me actually. It is here that we get to see more clearly than in the movie the collectivist and environmentalist agenda that underlies and drives it. One "expert" featured in the documentary caught my attention in particular: former libertarian cum green conservative, John Gray. No, I don't think John Gray's come back from the Dark Side yet. |
I don't know how similar/dissimilar the movie and the book are.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't read Brave New World, 1984, or Fahrenheit 451 yet (although I've seen the movie version of the last), but I own them and have them on my reading list.
A Canticle for Leibowitz and Snow Crash are on my shelf too, as yet unread.
I have read The Dispossessed and thought it was pretty good. And I love Ayn Rand's Anthem. It may be my favorite book of hers.
_________________
Yours in liberty,
Geoffrey Allan Plauche
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
("Who watches the watchmen?")
-Juvenal, Satires VI.347
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Liege-Killer
Joined: 12 May 2008
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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| I just reviewed (here) a pretty good dystopia novel, The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley.
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