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Dystopian Literature
Kai:
--- Quote from: Hythlodaeus ---We by Evgenii Zamyatin.
Managed to write a dystopian-future-as-allegory-for-Stalinism in the early 1920's.
--- End quote ---
This is actually the book I was wondering if anybody was going to mention. So totally awesome. Although I thought his first name was Yevgeny? I don't know. Silly Russians.
Khar's list also pretty much hits the nail on the head.
As for Clockwork Orange, the inclusion of made up slang words and whatnot threw me off in the beginning and I never got into it. Also, Kubrick did a wonderful job in the movie.
I also reccomend the following:
This Perfect Day - Ira Levin
Managerial Revolution - Burnham
Iron Heel - Jack London
Anthem - Ayn Rand
Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
And some others that aren't coming to me. I'll look at my shelf later.
IronOxide:
I've read Anthem and Ferinheit 451, which I loved. So i'm going to read Brave New World, eventually.
zmeiat_joro:
--- Quote from: Kai ---This is actually the book I was wondering if anybody was going to mention. So totally awesome. Although I thought his first name was Yevgeny? I don't know. Silly Russians.
--- End quote ---
It's Евгений. /jEvg_jEnij/.
cuchlann:
Bunnyman: good points about cyberpunk, but a few things can still mark it as a dystopian genre. Most dystopian fiction *does* come from a particular tendency current in the writer's time. That is, 1984 wouldn't sound the way it does if it hadn't been written during the early stages of the Cold War, when everyone still freshly remembered the World War. Also, if you run with the assumption common in cyberpunk that the corporations are running things (through a puppet government, simple corporate-bloc influence, et cetera) then it is the overarching power controlling people. It's just a new shift in the genre's ideas - the government in the eighties wasn't obviously intrusive enough to warrant fiction where they took characters off the street and brainwashed them - dissenters just disappear, or get paid what'll shut them up.
So it depends on which definition one uses to define "dystopia." Given the core value of writing a dystopia - social commentary - cyberpunk can easily be pointed to as a modern re-evaluation of dystopia. Just like cyberpunk is science-fiction, even though it doesn't involve spaceships and Buck Rogers-style heroes (or, going further back, Verne/Wells-esque inventors).
Someone asked about the Left Behind series. All I know about that is my professor (what set up the dystopian lit. class) made fun of that series when we were discussing what books she could use.
Paper Beats Rock:
I just consider dystopia to mean a society where things are presented as being much worse than they are now, kind of the opposite of 'utopia', even though the actual 'utopia' would be a dystopia by my definition.
It's odd though, because sometimes in dystopic literature the quality of life is higher than it is now, but the society or certain members have society have sacrificed something that makes it worse overall in the eyes of the author. So really, whether or not something is a dystopia or a utopia rests largely on the individuals values.
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