Literary Exploration discussion

With 1984 coming up next month, I'd like to know what you're favouite dystopian novel is?

1984 :P It's one of my favourite books

Great choice! Also A Clockwork Orange is a real horrorshow.

I need to reread that. It's been a very long time

Knowledge Lost wrote: "Great choice! Also A Clockwork Orange is a real horrorshow."

Can't agree more, especially when it's read aloud (as in the audiobook that I listened to) by Malcolm McDowell, a real treat!

I've just recently finished "Brave New World" and this is a masterpiece.
I loved every minute of reading it.

From the ones I read before, I'd choose "Gulliver Travel" (it's a dystopia and utopia in one book).

Booksy wrote: "From the ones I read before, I'd choose "Gulliver Travel"

Jack Black has forever ruined that story for me

I love, love, love 1984. Back when I read it, I fell in love with it so badly that I even started searching up the rest of that manual online, found a copy, printed it out on 100 pages, then worked my way through it. xD Ah, the folly of youth!

I also adore The Giver (which I only really understood after I reread it again years later).

I started reading A Clockwork Orange, but somehow it was easier to wrap my mind around the movie (not that that's easy, exactly, but easiER).

I didn't like Brave New World much at all. I am slightly prejudiced against the book (for no other reason than 8th grade English class trauma) but I just can't work with the story line or world view.

Strangely enough, I really really enjoyed The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset. I tend to tear YA books to shreds, but this trilogy was surprisingly good!

Another really good, but super super creepy dystopian book is a work by Stephen King: The Long Walk. I still ponder this book and the meaning behind it to this day! Darn you, King, for making a book that has no horror, yet haunts me far more than It or The Shining ever will!

There's another book that I would label as childrens/YA, but the subject matter really is not meant for such young minds. Unwind freaked me out so much I told everyone I met about it, thought about it for almost a week straight, and still get creeped out when I think of amputees and their replacement limbs/organs/etc.

Now another classic: The Lottery. Those of you who weren't made to read this story are lucky. Those of you who were made to read it in grade / middle school probably still live with the trauma today (I know I do). I wont go into details, but it's one of the most appalling short stories I have ever read.

Also, I started reading The Uglies Trilogy but it had way too much icky teenage angst in it. Started Fahrenheit 451, but I get distracted too easily. Started Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but couldn't finish due to being too weirded out by electric animals and a culture that needs them.

Also also (and this is the last), there is one book I'd like to mention, but probably isn't for a lot of you. Evenfall was a book I found, published online, for free, but it contains some m-m content. There isn't much focus on that, though, and all the action scenes DEFINITELY make up for any "icky romance" that might appall readers. (My opinion: I enjoyed it all *wink wink*)

And I think that's my list for now. *big cheery smile*

Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopian theme. I actually watched this movie in the 70's. Ugh!

Kevin wrote: "Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopian theme. I ac..."

Soylent Green! sounds delicious

Xeni, that's an impressive list. I like many of those: 1984, The Giver, The Hunger Games series, and Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorites. I did like Brave New World. I really love this theme.

I also have Clockwork Orange on my shelf, but haven't persuaded myself to read it as of yet. If it is anything like the film, I'm not looking forward to stomaching all the violence.

"The Lottery" is so bizarre and malevolent, all with a "ho-hum" attitude. High schoolers all have the same response, which is one of utter disgust at reading it.

♥Xeni♥ wrote: "I love, love, love 1984. Back when I read it, I fell in love with it so badly that I even started searching up the rest of that manual online, found a copy, printed it out on 100 pages,..."

I read the review on "The Long Walk"... it is indeed a very intriguing book, just added to my TBR list. Thanks for that ♥Xeni♥

If anyone is interested in a really interesting dystopian novel (and by interesting I mean kind of bizarre and challenging but still quite brilliant) I would recommend Super Sad True Love Story

Kevin wrote: "Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopian theme. I ac..."

I wasn't sure if I wanted to put this one on my list, Kevin. My 7th grade science teacher had us watch the movie (I remember the really strange commercials from back then!). A few months ago I found a copy of the ebook and read it. But the movie really expanded on the theme and built up on the novel a LOT. The book was really very short, boring and didn't have much in the way of (view spoiler)["Soylent Green is People!!" (hide spoiler)] that Charlton Heston is so famous for. xD

Knowledge Lost wrote: "If anyone is interested in a really interesting dystopian novel (and by interesting I mean kind of bizarre and challenging but still quite brilliant) I would recommend [book:Super Sad True Love Sto..."

Really? This is dystopian and good? xD It sounds more like a build up for a war-time story. but I'll check it out!

EDIT: Found an ebook, reading now :)

♥Xeni♥ wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopi..."

I had not read the book; just watched the movie. It has been so long since I have seen it I can't quite remember the whole story. I remember movies more than books from my youth. I only started reading for enjoyment when I started college I am sad to say. I may make it a goal to read the books for the movies I liked growing up.

God, I just love the dystopian genre so much - not because I enjoy reading about misery and suffering, hah, but because of the freedom for authors to craft their concepts in such a pure form - it's just art at its best for me, if done well. I don't need apocalypses all the time, don't like zombies at all (don't shoot me!), and I consider Franz Kafka or Daniel Keyes to be just as fitting in the genre as say, George Orwell.

I'm so incredibly biased towards Brave New World it isn't funny anymore. I was thirteen when I read it and it really shook me to my core. I don't think any book will ever have such an impact on me again.

Other very interesting reads are: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, Island by Aldous Huxley, The Castle by Franz Kafka, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (again).

If you're looking for a book of the lighter, sledge-hammer-wielding-moral-of-the-story variety you could try Blind Faith by Ben Elton. It's worthy of a few good chuckles and though everything's so painfully unsubtle, I sometimes felt that it completely matched the whole purpose and idea behind the book - how the masses don't need much to be dumbed down even more until they're practically infants dependent on any and all biased information outlets that technology provides them with.

...And I just went on another recommendation rampage.

And we're very glad you did, Diamosity!

Diamosity wrote: "God, I just love the dystopian genre so much - not because I enjoy reading about misery and suffering, hah, but because of the freedom for authors to craft their concepts in such a pure form - it's..."

Flowers for Algernon isn't dystopian... What makes you think it is?


Also, no one has mentioned Animal Farm yet. Another classic Huxley. XD

Melki wrote: "And we're very glad you did, Diamosity!"

Haha, thanks! That does make me feel a little better :')

Xeni: I look at the dystopian genre as something really flexible - if it talks about destructive consequences of the present and implications about humankind's future I see it as dystopian. I know I should probably just call it sci-fi, but I'm just stubborn like that!

No, seriously, I think the technology to transform the simple-minded to geniuses was well thought-out and while I know it's a parable I think it was the advanced technology and what it did to the main character's psyche that made me feel it was dystopic. A critical view of "improving" individuals through our own choices, not nature's, if you will.

Basically, if it's set in the future or doesn't have a set time frame and it's got some social critique that's frightening to me it's a dystopia, haha.

Your last explanation resonates the most with my idea of dystopia. I guess I just figured that Charlie's case could so easily happen already in today's world that it didn't seem futuristic or unreal at all.

Stephen King's The Stand was a gripping distopian saga. Or maybe I was just in the mood for it when I read it. And I am a sucker for plague sweeps over the earth and changes everything tales.

I loved A Clockwork Orange, back in my youth. As with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, though, my memories of the book became conflated with images from the film, so there is always Malcolm McDowell's eyes being propped open by metal tongs in my mind. I don't remember the violence being graphic, not the way some novelists write it these days.

The Handmaid's Tale is very good, just a little too plausible and chilling to really enjoy, I thought, given the political climate in the US at the time it came out.

A shout out for Soylent Green! What a shocker the ending was, back when the movie came out. Not great cinema, but classic scifi popcorn fare, for sure. I always think I should read some Harry Harrison, but don't think I ever have.

I enjoyed Hunger Games, although it turns pretty contrived and hokey toward the end, and am looking forward to the popcorn movie based on it.

Some of the others folks have mentioned I've read, but so long ago.....

I'm nervous about re-reading 1984, that it's going to seem too spot on for our present reality. :)

♥Xeni♥ wrote: "Also, no one has mentioned Animal Farm yet. Another classic Huxley. XD
..."

I wouldn't normally think of Animal Farm as dystopia. I actually preferred Animal Farm to 1984 (it's by Orwell, not Huxley : ) ) though I'd probably have difficulty explaining why. I guess it's because both books have at their heart a fear of the totalitarian state, and while I sort of felt like 1984 was a lot of Cold War paranoia, at least Animal Farm was grounded in a historically specific situation and can be valued from that perspective.

I know there are a lot of good things to recommend 1984, and some of it's predictions turned out to be eerily true, but I think I just didn't really connect with Winston (I'll concede that might have more to do with myself than Orwell's writing). I've read a number of other books concerning protagonists trying to navigate the totalitarian state that I've liked a great deal more, particularly Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.

Oops.. Meant to say Orwell. Sorry for that! (I was thinkingtoo much about Brave New World in the back of my mind, I think).

I hve diffuculty putting Animal Farm into the genre of dystopian fiction mainly because it seems more like a philosophical novel; a "look at these humans now", rather than 1984 which is predicting the future.

When I was researching/writing for my novel The A-Men, I read a lot of dystopian stories to get just the right balance of future world and collapsing society. I wanted to use the trope of the main character entering a riot-torn corporate-run city while mixing this with strong fantasy elements/stories.

Gibson was an early influence for me... but the final list included:

Cloud Atlas*
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Battle Royale
Brave New World
A Clockwork Orange
Count Zero*
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Roadside Picnic*
Neuromancer
Perdido Street Station*
The Running Man
The Children of Men

The ones with asterisks are my personal favourites.

I think Cloud Atlas has to be my all-time favourite as it is so brilliantly clever and so well written, as a writer, I have to doff my cap to that aspect!

Hmm, never even heard if Cloud Atlas! I will check it out. :D

Kevin wrote: "Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopian theme. I ac..."

Kevin, I saw that movie -- Soylent Green -- in the 70's too. I don't remember much about it, but I do remember that it was definitely quite disturbing. But since I was probably around 13 years old (maybe 14) when I saw it, I actually LIKED disturbing and scary movies, so of course I thought the movie was great. (I didn't know any better -- back then I thought the world was a safe place and only scary and bad things could happen in books and movies!!!) Well, now I can't watch scary and disturbing movies or read scary and disturbing books.

So funny that you mentioned that film. I think about it every now and again. The book is probably very interesting. I'm going to add it to my "to read" list. I won't actually read it, but I'd like to just flip through it at a bookstore or library.

Barbara wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Has anyone heard of "Soylent Green?" This was a movie done in 1973. This movie was based on the book "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison in the 60's. This story fits the dystopi..."

The book is very different from the film. I probably mentioned this above. I was *so* excited to get a copy of the book that I started reading as fast as I could, and then all of a sudden the story was over. I was like "what?? Wheres the whole rest of the story!?!"

So, the book really is a premise, on which the director/producer/writer/who knows really developed the movie from.

If you'd like, I can share my ebook copy with you for you to take a look at. Not the best quality (if I remember) but gets the job done.

I think it would be cool to check out. I was looking for movies on Netflix that have a Dystopian Theme. I came across Logan's Run, Silent Running, and Blade Runner. Good classics, however, they may seem a bit cheesy if I watched them now.

Hi Xeni, Thanks so much for offering to share your ebook copy with me!!! But based on what you said about the book, it sounds as though all of the weird and interesting stuff was really created by the people who made the film.

Yep, that's about right. Sadly. :(

Many of my favorites have been mentioned... Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 above all.

But I wonder... Does Lord of the Flies count? Because that is one of my favorites of all times.

Also, I have recently seen the movie based on Children of Men, but I have not read the book. I wonder if any of the genre-fans here have read it... I am tempted to pick it up, I liked the movie.

I think Lord of the Flies would count, it has a lot of elements in it that do make the society a dystopia

I really want to read the dystopian classic We. Will hopefully start soon.

A lot of Couplands books has some dystopian characteristics. I also really liked Oryx and Crake but haven't read the follow up yet.

As I mentioned in another thread, I am really enjoying reading 1Q84. I have seen it listed as 'dystopian', but I am not sure it qualifies. It's a dystopian - sci fi - fantasy mix. The world is dark, but it does have plenty of hope...

I have also enjoyed Oryx and Crake a lot and I am looking forward to the sequel.

Oh... one I did not see mentioned - or maybe I just missed it... Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro.

Veljko wrote: "Oh... one I did not see mentioned - or maybe I just missed it... Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro."

Annis mentioned it and we just read it for a group read in January.

I definitely think Lord of the Flies would fall under dystopian, especially how things play out on the island from Ralph's point of view and struggle with forces that get out of control.

Kim, I've heard a lot of about We as dystopian. I want to try reading that one of these days.

I think Lord of the Flies is really a contained microcosm of anarchy and so not dystopian.

I agree, 1Q84 is not dystopian - it's - it's .... well it's Murakami ... personal, societal, enigma - it doesn't justify, judge or anything else, it just is.

I think I would have to say that Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite so far. I haven't read a lot of dystopian books. Although I am working on reading The Handmaid's Tale now so maybe I can add more later.

Moon wrote: "I think I would have to say that Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite so far. I haven't read a lot of dystopian books. Although I am working on reading The Handmaid's Tale now so maybe I can add more later."

Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorites as well, not only dystopian, but of all books.

Thank God for Orwell. 1984 is strongly anticlerical, and therefore excellent. We is a very strong book, well worth reading.

As a dystopian writer I choose Brave New World as my favorite. But I read lots of recommendations here, I'll definitely pick some to read (for instance, didn't know Stephen King wrote a dystopia, The Stand). Thanks folks!