Review of A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock

Dystopia is such delicate material to work with.  Done well, it quietly informs theme, emerges from the background at opportune moments to interact with character, and does its part to influence mood and atmosphere.  Done poorly, it is an in-your-face experience that detracts from the story in its exuberance of imagination and/or proselytizing.  Given such a large number of post-Y2K texts use the motif, it has become increasingly difficult for a writer to not only do dystopia well, but distinguish their world.  In her debut novel A Calculated Life (2013), Anne Charnock accomplishes just this.

A simple comparison: Kameron Hurley’s God’s War is DYS-TO-PIA. The author goes far out of her way to make the setting as black as possible.  The futuristic Manchester, England Charnock portrays in A Calculated Life is likewise grim.  But there is a significant difference in presentation.  Where Hurley takes every opportunity (paragraph, even) to cram some visceral, grimy aspect of life down the reader’s throat, Charnock’s manner of portraying a depressing world is rooted in more subtle ideas.  Teeny-tiny apartments, unsatisfied people, limited freedoms, narrow employment opportunities in an economically downcast period, drab building materials, the nuanced oppression of the class system—her setting clings much closer to empathy and relevancy than Hurley’s comic book sensationalism, resulting in a dystopia with potential to comment upon reality.

Review of The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley

It is a simple dream that criminals might be whisked away to an isolated land, a place to live amongst their own kind and do what it is that makes them criminals, never to enter good society again.  The idea the opening premise of Robert Sheckley’s 1960 novel The Status Civilization, the ensuing planetary adventure gradually evolves into a story of personal discovery in a universe gone mad.  The absurd deteriorating into the merely surreal, it is also utopian satire. 

Awaking to discover he has no memories save those of a hazy murder, on the first page of The Status Civilization Will Barrent quickly learns he’s on a prison ship bound for a place called Omega.  An insular planet where convicted criminals live, rule, and die, the average life span is a scant three years, long term survival unlikely.  Stepping out of the ship and onto the sidewalk, Barrent is immediately confronted by three men drawing lots to decide who has the right to shoot him first; it is hunting day for newbies.  Escaping into a nearby building with a victim’s sanctuary sign above the door, he discovers the room is not intended to assist him, rather to ensure no rights violation is occurring.  As newbies are legal game on hunting day, the proprietor of the sanctuary promptly draws a gun himself.  Barrent narrowly escaping the sanctuary, he gradually but uneasily settles in to Omegan society as an owner of a shop selling poison antidotes.  He meets a priest in the religion of Evil, talks with a mutant soothsayer, learns about the Black One, and has a few encounters with a mysterious woman who, for reasons he cannot scry, helps him through the ordeals Omega’s strictly hierarchical society places on him.  Though experience gains him status, unfortunately for Barrent, it also increases the size of the cross-hairs on his back.

Review of The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

The humanitarian atrocities of certain regions in Africa are well-documented.  Warlords piling on top of warlords, all fighting for self-perceived causes or just a moment of megolomaniacal glory, much of the continent’s 20 and 21st century history, with the introduction of western weapons, is bound up in bloodshed of the most appalling, cyclical, anti-humanist variety.  For every beautiful, smiling face a person sees in a tourist brochure or UNICEF ad, there is a child soldier lying dead in a ditch. Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2012 YA novel The Drowned Cities, follow up to the successful Ship Breaker, captures precisely such a violent time in an American future history.  A grim, harrowing account, a teenage girl fights to save a friend who once saved her in a land turned upside down by internecine war and feigned patriotism.

The novel is the story of Mahlia, a half Chinese, half American girl left behind in the drowned cities (a post-flood, tropical version of the Chesapeake Bay area) after the death of her mother and father’s return to China to escape the partisan violence which followed upon America’s fragmentation in the aftermath of environmental disaster.  Caught by a passing warlord, Mahlia’s hand is chopped off.  With her head planned next, a boy named Mouse steps in at the last moment to save her.  The pair escaping the warlord, they eventually find themselves living with and assisting a doctor in a remote jungle village called Banyantown.  Only partially out of the warzone, however, distant guns can be heard throughout the day and soldiers occasionally tramp through.  But when a highly-prized escapee finds himself in their backyard one day, it’s only a matter of time before a whole army comes looking to collect.  Matters drawing to a head in Banyantown as the soldiers carouse and trample what semblance of civilized life remains to the village, Mouse and Mahlia’s have their worlds spun further out of control.

Review of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Growing up poor, no matter America or in Africa, is a difficult task.  Human nature being what it is, a variety of perspectives can be taken of the wealth gap.  The affluent side might be something mysterious and forever unattainable, it can be motivation to work hard and one day find yourself amongst the rich and likewise a lifestyle entirely undesirable, it can be something that becomes owed—like feelings of victim hood, it can be the nexus for crime and other means of obtaining fast wealth, it can be the source of depression and frustration, and it can be accepted as normal; life just goes on, best to be happy with what you have instead of don’t have.  An interesting examination of the haves and have nots, Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2011 YA novel Ship Breaker takes a look at the world through the eyes of a poor teenage boy.  Existing at one of the lowest rungs of society, it’s through a whirlwind adventure that the ultimate value of his life is made apparent.

Ship Breaker is set in a post-oil world warmed drastically by the greenhouse effect.  The polar ice caps have melted and raised sea waters hundreds of feet, inundating the continents.  Humanity pushed back but not defeated, the effect is nevertheless significant.  Whole cities drowned, conglomerates of the destitute have emerged wherever food can be found and valuable materials scavenged.  It is on the coastline of what was once Louisiana that young Nailer is found.  Rooting through abandoned tanker ships, he locates steel, copper, and other metals to earn his quota for the day.  Choking dust and mold filling every breath and the danger of being in tiny, enclosed environments haunting every step, his working conditions are abysmal.  But nothing is as bad as his return home.  Richard Lopez, Nailer’s father, is a drunken drug addict who beats his son for the most trivial of transgressions.  But one day, when a major storm breaks over the beach, their lives change forever.

Review of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

There are few works in literature, let alone science fiction, that can match the power of the statement Aldous Huxley makes about humanity and its future in his landmark Brave New World.  Required reading in schools across the US, Huxley plausibly creates a bright, wonderful future society, then destroys it in one massive proverbial blow.  Published in 1932, the book’s reaction to American economic and cultural practice has been largely justified by the ongoing homogenization of world culture, making it one of the most relevant works created to date on the subject of globalization, cultural evolution, and the future of technology’s role in society.

Brave New World, particularly the outset, is largely an exercise in world building.  Wholly a futuristic vision, society is organized along much different, though credible lines.  Childbirth now possible only for a chosen few, babies are grown in vats and intelligence decanted to Alpha, Beta, Cappa, Delta and Epsilon levels.  Epsilons performing the manual labor and Alphas the brain work, society is striated to the maximum.  Everyone, however, is able to enjoy sensuality (recreational sex and “feely” movies), socio-religious experiences, drug induced happiness (soma), and materialist consumption in keeping with the Word State’s Commerce Economy.  A utopia, Huxley's plot sets about dismantling the vision one ideological brick at a time.

Review of "Nineteen Eighty-four" by George Orwell

What is there to write that hasn’t already been written about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four?  Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the novel’s ideas proved so fundamental they have become idiomatic in the English language.  ‘Big Brother’, ‘Thought Police’, ‘Orwellian’, and to some extent ‘doublethink’ and ‘2+2=5’, are expressions most are familiar with and part of everyday speech.  Given the depth political and social realities are delved into in realistic, eye-opening fashion, it’s an understatement to write Nineteen Eighty-four is one of the most significant works of science fiction to have been written.

Ignore the title; Nineteen Eighty-four is not an attempt at futurology.  Intended as a cautionary, the book is the story of Winston Smith, an ordinary government worker living in unordinary circumstances.  His job to revise history per orders from above, Smith’s life is filled to the brim with cameras, listening devices, and government snitches trying to maintain a status quo that is anything but free.  The Party’s totalitarian regime—generally nicknamed ‘Big brother’ by citizenry—monitors nearly all aspects of life, including work, home, even people’s love lives.  Beyond voyeuristic, Smith et al must watch their every move lest the most minor of statutes or laws be broken. The Thought Police watching and waiting, most offenders are dragged away, never to be seen again.  Smith’s days filled with anxiety and dread as he trudges from work to home, meeting the enigmatic Julia one day moves life in new directions.  But is Big Brother watching?