Dystopia Utopia Short Stories

by Laura Bulbeck (Editor), Dave Golder (Foreword), Edward Bellamy (Contributor)

Following the great success of 2015's Gothic & Fantasy deluxe edition short story compilations, this latest in the series is packed with bleak and paradisiacal visions in equal measure. Adventures in worlds of boundless imagination from classic authors are cast with previously unpublished stories by exciting budding contemporary writers.

Genres: Short Stories, Dystopia, Fiction, Science Fiction, Anthologies, Horror, Fantasy

480 pages, Hardcover

First published August 26, 2016

Reviews

[Morgan Kail-Ackerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had some fun stories. I love dystopians and enjoyed all of these short stories. I had just a few problems with this anthology.

1) The weird range of stories made me confused. Having Voltaire and Jack London and Mary Shelley in a book with very modern dystopian young adult writers was off-putting as the reader. As great and important as Thomas More’s Utopia is, I don’t think it has a place with a modern lesbian love story about gods and social media/reputation in the 21st century.

2) Not all of these were short stories. A few were excerpts from books, for example the first five chapters of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. I wanted short stories and expected it. Having snippets of books were not my favorite.

3) Some of the short stories in here I would not consider a dystopian. Maybe I have a closed mindset to what a dystopian is however there were some stories that were more sci-fi and apocalyptic than dystopian. When I think dystopian, I would think of a society, a prospering society, that happens after a changing of the regular Earth rules. If it doesn’t take place on Earth, that is a sci-fi, like Jeremy Szal’s The Galaxy’s Cube. I would also argue that if the story is an apocalypse, then it would not be a dystopian, like Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague.


Overall, I did like this collection. The following were my favorite stories:

A Model Life - Kim Antieau
The Festival of the Cull - Steve Carr
Survival Instincts - Carolyn Charron
Glass - Megan Dorei
The Keepers of Madleen - Sarah Lyn Eaton
Sultana’s Dream - Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Order, Excellence, Prosperity - Michelle Kaseler
The Object of Worship - Claude Lalumière
The New Law - Jeff Parsons
Islets of the Blest - Nidhi Singh
The Galaxy’s Cube - Jeremy Szal

[Elzbeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved that it was a mix of old and new stories. But issue though was that the older ones tended to be so much longer than the newer one. Not short stories, but usually sections from novels. Which isn’t bad, I know there aren’t a lot of older short stories, especially dystopian in nature, but I loved a lot of the newer ones and wish they could have gone on longer.

[Brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. It has the perfect balance between utopias and dystopias. I loved the act that they included classical authors and modern authors, some authors only have blog stories, others are well known like Mary Shelly or Thomas Moore. It took years for me to finish it because it’s huge, but it’s trully worth it. I really recommend it.

[Faith Salyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked out a few favorite stories from this book, but I liked all of them. I love the dark twists and the originality of the stories.

[Briar]

I'll try to come back to this book eventually, but I feel a bit misled. Yes, I did buy it just because it looked cool at Half Price Books. No, I don't think I should have. It seems less a collection of short stories and more an anthology of stories, excerpts from classic novels, and the like. I also don't get much of a 'dystopian' feeling from the few I did read. That being said, I couldn't make it very far not because it was a little boring (it was, but that's nothing to hold against something outside of my typical style anyways).

I think this book could use some more editing. There were a lot of typos just from my brief foray into the pages. I can't finish this book because I physically cannot READ it, though - the pages are very wide, with thin margins, and the book is significantly taller than average with a very tiny font and single line spacing. All this to say, I strained to keep my eyes on the line I was reading, and gave up quickly because I'd often find myself unable to find where the next line began, losing my train of thought. It required more focus to find the next line than it did even to read and process the words. I'm not sure how a dyslexic person could ever be expected to read this. Why are there practically no paragraphs?

I have a sneaking suspicion this book was meant to be used more as decoration than reading material, which - fair enough. It's pretty enough just to sit on my shelf. I don't regret that.

[Domenica Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, there are many stories in here. Most of them are pretty good. It's a large book and that makes it last a while. Some of the stories were predictable. The Utopia story, by Thomas More, on what all the rest have been based on, was a difficult read. I mean, it was written in the 1500's so, there's that. Run on sentences and some confusion as to who was speaking. Anyway, there were other great short stories.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of the stories in this collection (both old and new) really appealed to me. I was less enthusiastic about the chapters from longer novels, as I'd rather read them in context. I appreciated the variety of tales/worlds included.

[seren · Rating 2 out of 5]

some of these stories are great. overall though, these authors need to hire editors or beta readers or something, considering the amount random gramatical errors and the fact that a main characters name changes for 2 sentences and back again within a story.

[Jeff Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the incuded stories, I had previously read.
Others were chapters from lengthier stories, so added those to my general reading list.
Balance were true short stories. Couple of beauties in here

[Marksson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bearing in mind this book cost me £20, the fact that each short story is halved, with half in the book and the finish of each story then available to download online, tends to rankle somewhat