I once wrote on this blog that Cormack Mcarthy's The Road is a great book and that everyone should read it. Or something. It is a great book and everyone should read it. My taste in books is now vindicated by the illustrious Eric Snider. He has some positive comments on The Road at his blog.
I just finished Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It was a fantastic book. So engaging I could not put it down. 374 pages in about 3 days. Shades of 1984, shades of Brave New World, shades of The Time Machine, Frankenstein, and others. But not in a rip-off way, either. More like a tribute way. It's as if Atwood is at once recognizing the greatness of other authors and building on it, going beyond it, synthesizing and incorporating it into something new and her own.
I was first introduced to Margaret Atwood by my wife, who is the proud owner of a paperback copy of every Atwood novel. However, it wasn't until I my senior English seminar on Utopian and Dystopian literature that I read one of her books, The Handmaid's Tale. In that same course, we also read The Republic, Utopia, Gulliver's Travels, Herland, We, 1984, Brave New World, The Dispossessed, and I'm probably not remembering a few.
So what follows is my attempt at a few recommendations of dystopic literature:
1. 1984 is kind of like the granddaddy of the genre. It isn't the oldest or the biggest or the most complex, but it is probably the most read and the most influential. It is the most political, for sure, and perhaps the most enduringly relevant.
2. The Time Machine is not the most elegantly written piece of fiction out there, but it remains one of my favorites. It was truly inventive for Wells to take social stratification to its most frightening Darwinian conclusion.
3. Brave New World is a well-written work by a truly crazy man. It really makes you think. I wonder, though, how many of the politicos who cite it in their fear-mongering about stem cells have actually read it.
4. The Road is a recent novel by a man who customarily writes stories about cowboys and sunsets and dangerous mexican jails and bleak desolate country and what it means to be a man. It is a post-apocalyptic account of a man and his son (Abraham/Isaac and God/Christ comparisons are inevitable) trying to survive. It is probably the most gorgeous on my list in its use of language. The most poetic, the most lyrical. I actually cried.
5. Oryx and Crake is, as noted above, fantastic. I think it's better than Handmaid's Tale. At least, the fact that it is less in-your-face feminist makes it seem a bit more universal, and it explores the themes common to the genre more deeply than Handmaid's Tale.
6. A few selections of the Book of Mormon (The Book of Fourth Nephi and The Book of Ether), I think qualify as dystopian writing.
7. Some helpful background: it is almost impossible to read some of these pieces without an understanding of a few biblical stories: Eden, and Abraham and Issac are probably the two most critical. Sir Thomas More's Utopia is also helpful, as is The Republic, as well as some cursory knowledge of Marxism and Utilitarianism. Knowing Shakespeare makes everything better, and these books are no exception.
Any other thoughts? Have I missed any? Any that don't belong here?
