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FMK#29: Political Satires and Dystopias
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
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
Utopia by St. Thomas More (1553)
Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)
Comrades, a story of social adventure in California by Thomas Dixon (1909)
We by Evgenii Zamyatin (1921)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Zotz! by Walter Karig (1947)
Search the Sky by Pohl and Kornbluth (1954)
The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley (1955)
The Revolt of Gunner Asch by Helmut Kirst (1956)
The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck (1957)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Peter George (1964)
Alph by Charles Maine (1973)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010)
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(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.)
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(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.
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(Anonymous) 2017-11-02 02:31 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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