Top 5 Wednesday is a feature from GingerReadsLainey and you list your top 5 of something. This week is futuristic books. So there. These are mine.
Obviously I need to
mention this. It’s amazing. It’s the dystopia that everyone knows about. And it
lives up to the hype in my opinion. It’s about a man named Winston who works
for the ministry of truth. The world is basically a police state, and Winston’s
job is to take old news clippings and change them to reflect the current mood
of the government. It’s very eerily right about the future, which is creepy. He
imagines TV screens and computers and governments watching the people and
arresting them for supposed crimes. It’s amazing. Orwell was a brilliant
political writer. It’s good.
Brave New World is a dystopia/utopia. I’m not entirely
sure. I think it’s technically a utopia. The world is a perfect beautiful place
where people are made in incubation tubes and they spend their days doing
things they love, pleasure, food, sex, everything good. It makes them docile
and it makes them not want to rebel, and it’s fascinating. Because obviously
the government decides everything and controls them and people who don’t fit
are thrown out as savages, and no one rebels or argues. It’s very opposite to
1984, and I think Brave New World is a lot scarier. Because it feels even more
real I think. It’s basically based on the idea that what we love will destroy
us and it hits close to home.
The Windup Girl is set in Asia mainly and it’s a
dystopia where calories have become currency, which I thought was fascinating.
There’s a plague like disease killing people and ruining food. Global warming
has pretty much fucked over the world and food is really scarce, because of a
spreading disease. And because food is currency there is a huge market for
bio-terrorists ruining some foodstuffs to help certain companies. It’s based
around a man named Anderson who is trying to find foodstuffs that he hopes
aren’t extinct. And he becomes obsessed with an AI, the Windup Girl, Emiko, and
falls in love with her. Which is very uncommon as they are seen as slaves and
soulless. It was amazing and fascinating.
This is also a sort of stalwart of dystopia. It’s set
in a future where women have become slaves basically. Women are pretty much
breeding stock. A lot of women are infertile, so young women are enslaved in
families where the man tries to impregnate her and the child is taken away and
given to the couple. Women are no longer allowed to read, and their clothes are
very strictly picked out. And the Handmaids are named for the men they serve.
It’s so creepy, with the religious awfulness, and the rape and the gross. That
made sense. It seems so insidious, which makes it worse somehow, because it
feels like it could happen.
This is technically a trilogy, but shut up. I really
loved this, I think Patrick Ness is amazing. It’s about a young man named Todd
who lives on a planet far from earth. He lives in a town with only men, ruled
by a man named Mayor Prentiss. All the women died from a disease years ago. And
all the men’s thoughts can be heard out loud, called Noise. And Todd is the
last boy in Prentisstown, and he will become a man soon, but then he suddenly
finds a hole in the noise, a little island of quiet, and he meets a girl,
Viola, and they have to run away. And it’s beautiful, and it deals with good
and evil, and also how it’s not always black and white, and how pragmatism
makes you make choices you might not think are the morally right choices, but
they’re the choices you have to make to survive and to help. It was just
amazing.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness