Books shelved under “Utopia Dystopia”

It’s been almost five weeks since I did this, so let’s hope my skills haven’t atrophied too much! My student teaching practicum was awesome, but it left me little time for reading and no time for reviewing. Now I need to catch up. So please forgive me if the details in this review are sparser than ordinary; there is a very good reason why I write reviews as soon as possible after finishing a book!

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Margaret Atwood looms large in that particularly Canadian part of my literary subconscious, the part that natters at me to call stuff "CanLit" and berates me for having never read anything by Michael Ondaatje. Atwood is Kind Of A Big Deal, but so far I have managed to avoid reading any of her novels and have read, as far as I can recall, one of her short stories. Already, though, I have a bone…

When confronted by the uncertain future, we look to our past. We look to it for answers, for enlightenment, for inspiration. Mostly we look to it because we have nowhere else to look. This is natural, but it's also dangerous, for we have a tendency to romanticize the past: everything was better before we had electricity, urbanization, automation; life was simpler, slower, satisfying. Sometimes we get caught up in that idyllic illusion of a pastoral…

Every science fiction fanatic, especially one as young as myself, has a list of classic science fiction books that he or she has yet to read. One's definition of classic can vary; it's not the content of the list that matters but its existence as a personal measure of our "SF street cred." I have read Dune and Starship Troopers, and plenty of Asimov pre-Goodreads. Until now, however, Fahrenheit 451 has eluded me. Today…

My review of Uglies stands for Pretties, because they are pretty much the same book.

Scott Westerfeld further fleshes out his post-apocalyptic adolescent dystopia. We get to see New Pretty Town from "the inside," because Tally Youngblood is now pretty—and vapid, at least until a letter from her past self jogs her memory that there's more to life than flash tattoos, parties, and cliques. Yeah, sounds like high school.

So Tally embarks on a…

With Uglies, Scott Westerfeld creates a creepy adolescent dystopia where "pretty" is decided by committee, and everyone at sixteen receives an operation to become pretty. Until then, one exists as an "ugly," good only for learning and playing pranks, banned from the parties and glitz of New Pretty Town. Of course, being a dystopia, there's more sinister workings afoot. Being pretty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In many ways, Uglies reminds me…

The perverse, contrary part of me enjoys panning books that receive wide acclaim. It's a calling (in the same way that being a creepy funeral home director is a calling). Giving a wildly popular book a bad review is almost as fun as giving a bad book a bad review. I'll be honest: it's an ego thing, a sense of smugness that comes from not succumbing to the hype.

So when I like a book,…

When I first began Kilimanjaro, I was worried it was just Kirinyaga, Take Two. I enjoyed Kirinyaga but felt no need for a repeat performance. It turns out that I was right but for the wrong reasons. Kilimanjaro stands apart from Kirinyaga, with different themes even if it has a similar setting.

The main character, David, seemed just as arrogant about the superiority of Maasai ways over Kikuyu ways as Koriba was…

I'm ambivalent about this book. The best way to describe my reservation with Woman on the Edge of Time is that I was never comfortable suspending my disbelief. I tried to make myself willing to go where Marge Piercy was taking me but never quite got there. Although the book steadily improved from its chaotic but very dull beginning, it never involved me in the way I require to get much satisfaction from reading. In…

The world of The Giver, Jonas' world, is one without sunlight, without colour, without anger or love or indeed any strong feelings at all. Sexual urges are a suppressed by a daily pill. Jobs are assigned by the community's Council of Elders. The only one who remembers—whose job is, in fact, to remember—what life was like before humanity went to "Sameness" is the Receiver of Memory. And Jonas is the lucky new recruit for…

Haze reminds me of a Heinlein novel, with a receptive but clueless protagonist immersed in a society he doesn't understand only to have that society explained to him, usually on socioeconomic terms. The end result is polemical and usually dry, and this book is no exception.

There's actually two stories going on, both featuring Keir Roget as their protagonist. One is the main plot as advertised by the title; the other occurs a few years…

The success of The Dispossessed lies in Le Guin’s presentation of two distinct visions of utopia. Each feels that the other is an aberration. Both are superior to the contemporary government of Earth, which at this stage has just barely managed to avoid destroying Earth's biome. Yet both are dysfunctional, have strayed from whatever utopian ideals may have founded them. They are not failed experiments, but they are not entirely successful either—owing to human nature—and…

Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga is an example of how science fiction isn't necessarily a genre; it's just a setting. Kirinyaga is technically science fiction, because it involves colonizing another world (the eponymous planetoid Kirinyaga, named for the mountain upon which the god of the Kikuyu, Ngai, lives). However, Kirinyaga isn't about spaceships or combat with high-tech weaponry or vast, evil empires. It's a collection of fables, and an extremely well-written one at that.

The narrator of …