FMK#29: Political Satires and Dystopias

[melannen]

Han of Iceland is due back to the library in a week and I can't renew it anymore. :/ I'm just over 1/3 of the way through. Four chapters ago, Hans snuck up on Spaguidry and did something offscreen that involved a lot of screaming, but meanwhile we've had many pages of Ethel's dad failing to recognize that the person he is talking to is also the person he is talking about (not even any disguises required! he just wouldn't stop talking long enough to allow an introduction, and by the time he did, it was just awkward), some revolutionaries conspiring over a bonfire, and many many pages of Ordener mooning over the distant light in Ethel's window.

I have hopes for onscreen violence before much longer, though.

Last week's F winner was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell, and K was Better to beg forgiveness.... In other good news, I went through the boxes of fmk-eligible books as part of my "clean everything" project, and thanks to ya'll, we have gone from six boxes + a small shelf + overflow to no more overflow! \o/ (And so far, all the fmk keepers have managed to fit into existing space on the keeper shelves.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: It's Halloween, so let's do something proper scary: OUR INEVITABLE SLIDE INTO DYSTOPIA

Poll #19011 FMK #29: Political Satires and Dystopias

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Respondents

Utopia by St. Thomas More (1553)

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F
14 (56.0%)

M
7 (28.0%)

K
4 (16.0%)

Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)

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F
10 (52.6%)

M
6 (31.6%)

K
3 (15.8%)

Comrades, a story of social adventure in California by Thomas Dixon (1909)

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F
9 (60.0%)

M
1 (6.7%)

K
5 (33.3%)

We by Evgenii Zamyatin (1921)

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F
9 (50.0%)

M
8 (44.4%)

K
1 (5.6%)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

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F
20 (55.6%)

M
8 (22.2%)

K
8 (22.2%)

Zotz! by Walter Karig (1947)

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F
5 (45.5%)

M
2 (18.2%)

K
4 (36.4%)

Search the Sky by Pohl and Kornbluth (1954)

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F
10 (66.7%)

M
1 (6.7%)

K
4 (26.7%)

The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley (1955)

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F
18 (75.0%)

M
3 (12.5%)

K
3 (12.5%)

The Revolt of Gunner Asch by Helmut Kirst (1956)

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F
7 (50.0%)

M
1 (7.1%)

K
6 (42.9%)

The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck (1957)

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F
8 (53.3%)

M
1 (6.7%)

K
6 (40.0%)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

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F
14 (50.0%)

M
5 (17.9%)

K
9 (32.1%)

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Peter George (1964)

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F
22 (84.6%)

M
2 (7.7%)

K
2 (7.7%)

Alph by Charles Maine (1973)

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F
0 (0.0%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
11 (91.7%)

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010)

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F
11 (42.3%)

M
1 (3.8%)

K
14 (53.8%)

Comments

[thawrecka]

I enjoyed the hell out of Brave New World when I read it in high school, but that was at least 17 years ago, probably closer to 20, so who knows if it stands up to cynical adult tastes.

[melannen]

Brave New World is one of those that I feel like I should read because it's classic but I don't feel like I actually want to...

[espresso_addict]

BNW is one of those books that shaped the way I look at the world, but it might also be one of those books that has been sucked dry by other lit stealing all its good ideas.

Thank you for this insight

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! "other lit stealing all its ideas" is why some classics seem so flat!

Re: Thank you for this insight

[melannen]

I used to call it the "LotR effect" because I had a bunch of friends in High School who didn't read LotR until they'd already met a bunch of 80s/90s fantasy and played D&D, and their reaction was it was okay but kind of cliched and weren't the hobbits basically a ripoff of d&d halflings?

Re: Thank you for this insight

[beatrice_otter]

I've always called it the Casablanca effect, because I know a lot of people who think Casablanca is unwatchable because it is just one long string of cliches. (Dude. THIS IS WHERE THEY COME FROM.)

[brownbetty]

I voted for BNW because it's honestly quite slight and you can knock it out in an evening, and then you'll be like "oooh, I get a whole bunch of references now"

[melannen]

"Quite slight and you can knock it out in an evening" is a great selling point! :D

[ambyr]

Coincidentally, I pulled a very fancy copy of Utopia out of a little free library yesterday. Now I want to know if it's worth reading.

[the_rck]

Utopia is not a novel in any sense at all. I found it tedious when I read it in college. It is an interesting historical artifact in terms of what people in the 16th century thought might make an ideal society.

[melannen]

Dunno! My copy isn't fancy, but it does have a really cool medieval illustration on the cover.

[the_rck]

Alph was pretty thoroughly terrible. I can't recommend it at all. I read all of it in high school because I was out of SF/fantasy that the library had that actually looked good. As I recall, there were no likeable characters, and the world building was not... Um. Even as a teen, I didn't think that a society consisting entirely of women would necessarily work that way.

More's Utopia was really tedious. I read that in college for a class. It's an interesting artifact, but it's no fun at all unless you're looking at it from that angle.

I'm not certain that Mockingjay will make any sense without the rest of the trilogy. I haven't read the series (my daughter has), but my understanding is that things are very tightly plotted.

I'm fond of The Mouse that Roared, but I don't know if it will have aged even remotely well. It's very absurd. The movie is fun.

[melannen]

I think I may actually have read part of Alph a long time ago and it felt like a master class in bad writing.

I did read the first two of the Hunger Games trilogy; but at the time I was looking for books about how to survive in a dystopia, not how to overthrow one, so I stopped after CF.

[the_rck]

I feel strongly enough that Alph is terrible that I'd suggest killing it even if it doesn't get the votes. Mainly keeping it would make sense if you want to compare it to other works with a similar premise.

[melannen]

Yeah, I think I have it because I was trying to read all the women-only societies. But so far all the ones I have read have either sucked or been too surreal to be useful in a comparison or been by Le Guin, so I'm not sure it's worth the bother.

[the_rck]

Oh, also, if this were a fic, it would have a warning for suicide written from the POV of the person killing herself. I don't know if that's a thing that would figure into the decision for you.

[alexseanchai]

Re Mockingjay: F Hunger Games first. If you like it, go on to Catching Fire. Then Mockingjay.

[melannen]

I did actually read the first two, but it was last November, and at the time I honestly couldn't stomach reading a third book where everything got unrealistically fixed and also there was a magic rebel base with superior technology, but I am now starting to be in a place were I can maybe believe it is possible for stuff to be fixed? (I was not impressed with the end of Catching Fire, but I think that may be more to do with the require beats of a YA dystopia trilogy than anything Collins did.)

(I also read just the first two Divergent books, and just the first two Cinder books, but those were from the library so it won't show up on FMK.)

[rachelmanija]

I hated Mockingjay but stuff getting unrealistically fixed was not a problem with it. Exactly. You could make an argument otherwise but not without spoilers.

[melannen]

I have an ongoing beef with "the little guys are going to start a revoltuion to bring down the oppressors! Except they only win because they control **plot macguffin**" stories.

(where Plot MacGuffin could be Chosen One, magic artifact, new source of unlimited renewable energy, secret base of advanced ancient technology, psychic powers, whatever.)

The end of Catching Fire seemed like it was rapidly going in that direction, but maybe not?

Tbh though last November I don't think I could have handled "they win and everything is better" OR "they win and nothing gets better" OR "they lose" as endings, though. (I was being very picky about my reading. I ended up reading all the Ben January mysteries instead because if you want "how to endure and thrive in a dystopia" free blacks in the 1840s US South is a good place to look.)

[rachelmanija]

Let me put it this way: part of my issue with Mockingjay was the complete incoherence of how things were happening (partly due to Katniss mostly not knowing or caring about the wider picture, but still) so I literally don't know if whatever went down did so because of plot macguffins or not.

[jesse_the_k]

First I'd heard of the Ben January mysteries. GoodReads thinks the first one is weak; would you suggest a different starting point?

[melannen]

I don't think it's the sort of series where the first one is bad enough I'd disrecommend it - the series hasn't quite hit its stride yet and a lot of the best recurring characters aren't around yet, or haven't got their relationships developed yet, but every series is like that. And if I'd skipped around more while reading them, I probably would have found it a little disappointing in comparison with the later ones. But it's not drastically worse or different than the others, and it does a good job of introducing the milieu, and one set of secondary characters that only have a large role in that first book are great.

(I'm also having trouble thinking of a better starting point - they all work reasonably well as stand-alone murder mysteries, no cliffhangers between books, but they're also split between ones set in New Orleans and ones with a lot of traveling. I think the traveling ones tend to be better as mystery novels, BUT you really need to see January at home among his community to really get it, and also New Orleans is where all the best side characters are.)

Although I read them all straight through while ill so I'm not doing the best at remembering what happened in which book...

Also if you are the sort of person who needs trigger warnings, note that they probably have ALL THE TRIGGERS at one point or another; I find them heartwarming because they're about people living in a situation where they have to expect terrible things to happen, but making good lives for themselves in despite, and they're murder mysteries so justice at least temporarily triumphs at the end of all of them, and they are also just OTT enough that they're not grimdark-realism in that grinding way. But yeah. Lots of fear and abuse and institutionalized oppression and generational trauma and the contstant threats of violence and sexual violence just taken for granted as the general backdrop to the main characters' lives.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for these details and content notes. Free people of color before the Civil War -- a certain amount of horror is realistic. I get squicked by lovingly detailed explorations of physical and sexual violence, but it sounds like this series doesn't revel in it.

[jesse_the_k]

That was me, somehow I hadn't logged in.

[melannen]

The only time I think where it approached squicky levels of horror for me was the end of the third book (and you'll know when you get there.) And as far as I can recall, the violent rape is all more-or-less offscreen. So yeah, it didn't come off as gratuitous to me.

[birke]

IAWTC.

[sheliak]

I adored The Mouse that Roared as a kid/teen, and quite liked most of the sequels. Particularly the space race one. It's been about a decade since I read any of them, though.

I've still got my copies; I should probably dig them out and see if they hold up.

[melannen]

Ooh, a space race one! That sounds amazing.

[sheliak]

The Mouse on the Moon was definitely my favorite of the sequels! ... Possibly because it was the only one where I knew anything at all about the source material. But I do remember it fondly.

[lannamichaels]

I loved Brave New World when I read in high school and reread it several times, and I hate the ending and all, but I think at least the beginning parts is pretty cool and very creepy.

I've never read the Strangelove book, but the movie's good, so it's probably fuckable? Since the rule of thumb is that the books are often better than movies.

Kill the hunger games, because I have opinions on a book series I've never read but that has spawned many crossovers and fusions and so I've unexpectedly had, like, body medical horror that I hadn't known was in the series through pop-culture-osmosis come at me in fic, and has led me to modifying my yuletide letter do not wants for the first time in years, and I hold a serious grudge. :P

[melannen]

I thought the Strangelove book was the book the movie was based on, but when I was looking up dates for the poll, it turns out they got the author of that book to do a *separate* movie novelization, which could be... interesting. (I have not seen the movie though, so I might not know the difference anyway.)

I read the first two Hunger Games and don't remember any medical body horror (lots of gore/mayhem, though.) But I would believe it comes up eventually. ):

[rushthatspeaks]

The prose of A Clockwork Orange is just fucking magnificent. One of the best extrapolations of slang into a future setting ever made. The language is, however, basically the thing that's there-- it's a great thing, but it's all there is. Oh, and sexual violence, of course.

We may be the greatest dystopia ever written, and I wish later books had taken more notice of it. It has still never been published in the original Russian.

[jesse_the_k]

+1 that you must read something by Anthony Burgess, because wow can he write. But everything he writes is the opposite of cheering. Clockwork Orange the book is parsecs ahead of the movie, so don't let any movie experience influence you. I have very fond memories of End of the World News: An Entertainment but it's been a couple decades.

[melannen]

yeah my knowledge of that book has me going, "I really want to read it for the language.... I really don't want to read it for the content."