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I'll confess that internally, I'm probably smug about a lot of the things I do, but I have the sense to keep my smugness to myself. But in this instance, I'm going to let my self-satisfaction shine brightly.
I voted early last week and I'm proud of it.
I think all Americans should vote early too. But if you're a procrastinator (which I usually am) then at least get out and vote on Tuesday, November 6th, which is the official and final day to vote in these mid-term elections.
Voting, if you can't tell, is something I'm passionate about. I think it's a right too many people take for granted. So in that line of thought, I put together my top ten list of dystopian novels to remind us of what the world looks like when democracy ceases to exist. Miriam Webster's definition of dystopia is:
an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly
It's not such a stretch, anymore, to think of a dystopia being real and not so "imaginary". We don't want to live in that world, and one of the best, easiest, and cheapest ways to fight against that reality is to get out and vote.
#10 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules
and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than
put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the
printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions
produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all
day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young
neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear
and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of
the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly
disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts
hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has
to run for his life.
#9 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have
created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and
behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been
assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure
that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been
anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx
is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for
compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few
remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue,
he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider
whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for.
#8 Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano is set in the near future, after a third world
war. While most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation's managers and
engineers faced a depleted workforce and responded by developing ingenious
automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few
workers. The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy
upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the
lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by
machines.
The bifurcation of the population is represented by the
division of Ilium, New York into "The Homestead," where every person
not a manager or an engineer lives, and the other side of the river, where all
the engineers and the managers live.
#7 We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
We is set into the far-flung future well after a war that had lasted two-hundred years.
D-503 lives in the One State, a lone city constructed almost entirely of glass so that the State can keep an eye on the citizens at all times.
Life is organized by the hour in order to maximum proficiency and maximum output from every inhabitant. People walk in step with each other and wear identical clothing with badges with their numbers/names for easy identification by the States agents.
'I' is not allowed. Only 'We' exists.
People do not have names, they have a serial number.
A permit is needed for times to have intimate relationships in order to lower the shades on the glass buildings the city is composed of.
There is total surveillance of every person.
While the final work to put the One State not only as an Earthbound government but to make it an interstellar one as well, D-503 begins to live a life of rebellion and secrets.
He is in a fight against time as the One State has developed a procedure to eliminate Imagination in order to make all the people of the One State more efficient and less distracted.
#6 When she Woke by Hillary Jordan
When She Woke,
tells the story of a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a
not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been
eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but
chromed—their skin color is genetically altered to match the class of their
crimes—and then released back into the population to survive as best they can.
Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder.
In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world,
Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to
question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that
politicizes faith.
#5 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the
nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The
Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all
to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to
participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death
sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But
Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature.
Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she
will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life
against love.
#4 Never Let Me Go by Kazo Ishiguro
Human
clones are created so that they can donate their organs as young adults. The
novel follows the life story of Kathy, a clone who is raised at a boarding
school for future “donors.”
#3 Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe
neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of
their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other
citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by
drugs, war, and chronic shortages of water, gasoline, and more. While her
father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with
hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain
of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed
and she is forced out into a world that is facing apocalypse. With a handful of
other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way
conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
#2 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may
leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets
whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer
allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the
Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and
the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can
remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke;
when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of
her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now...
#1 1984 by George Orwell
"The novel is set in an imaginary future world that is
dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's
hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His
longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the
government. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but they are both
arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and
reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make
him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual
dignity. Orwell's warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep
impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's
title and many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern
political abuses." -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
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