It’s a much subtler dystopia than Nineteen-Eighty Four. The latter is based on pure sadomasochism: The whole English Socialist system exists just so the Inner Party members can enjoy the sense of real power that can come only from making others suffer. In Brave New World, there is no exploiting class or caste as such – the Alphas and the World Controllers just work at their jobs like everybody else – and no systemic cruelty. Universal plenty and pleasure and contentment have been achieved for all, but at the price of freedom and individuality – also, at the price of progress; the World State, high-tech as it is, is reluctant to allow any further technological or social change of any kind. Presumably everything would be exactly the same a thousand years hence. (Granted, there have been many real human societies, such as ancient Sparta, and the Roman Empire, and China and India for most of their histories, based on exactly the idea that perfection has already been achieved and any change is ipso facto bad.)
I recommend S.M. Stirling’s Domination of the Draka series – a much less subtle dystopia, but more frightening because it is more plausible. Plus, Stirling writes more vivid combat scenes than any SF writer I’ve ever read.
Part of what I enjoyed about NLMG was the slow pace. When things finally come to light, it all seems so believable, because nothing just pops up and goes bang.
I just finished it and thought it was kind of meh. It did shock me when I realized what was going on, but then it just seemed kind of dull again. I’m thinking of starting a thread about it, actually.
Ooh, yeah. Correct on all points – an excellent novel that’s frightening, believable, and very depressing.
The Sheep Look Up, also by Brunner, is another grim vision of the near future – a future where so many man-made chemical toxins (both long- and short-acting) have been disseminated into the environment and the population that most rainfall has become poisonous, species extinctions occur faster than pop music fads come and go, most of a generation is being born defective, sickly and hyper-allergic … and shit looks like it’s only going to get worse.
Both of those novels ride the sharp edge of the thin line separating sci-fi and horror fiction until that edge cuts the reader right to the tailbone.
Just finished Join Me! by Danny Wallace, a mostly-true and very funny story about how he decides to start a collective (“It’s not a cult!” he’s constantly explaining) on a lark, all the while trying to keep his long-suffering Norwegian girlfriend from finding out. Wallace is a Brit with a very dry, understated sense of humor; you can almost imagine him telling the tale in a dimly-lit pub over a pint. I recommend it. And now I see it might be made into a movie…
Plausible? Don’t get me wrong, I read them all and they were a good, but disturbing read. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen an author’s thumb so blatantly unbalancing the scales. The re-issue with the extra covering story showing the Draka universe as only the 1 in a hugenumber of universes were everything happened to go the Draka’s way doesn’t make it any better.
I’m with you on this. Unlike some around here :dubious: I really enjoy Stirling’s books - I know they’re not high art but they’re fun. The Draka series was not fun
ps For those who are interested, the next in his Emberverse Sunrise Lands series, The Sword of the Lady, is available from 24 August.
Woman on the edge of timeis not a classic dystopian novel, but a … disturbing one about the future, and what goals are good and not. I didn’t really like it, but it’s a classic.
The fifth sacred thingby Starhawk is very very new-ageish (pagans and wicca-witchcraft and communing with the Earth and the Spirits stuff), and has one dystopian society and one hippie-community in conflict with each other. It does end happily, though.
More plausible than BNW because it requires us to imagine nothing new, save the combination of chattel slavery with high technology; everything else in the Domination Universe has ample historical precedent.
