I’ve been reading a ton of heavy stuff: histories of the Japanese economic crisis in the 1990′s, histories of Communism and Marxist philosophy, collections of Zen koan.
While this literature is all very fascinating, it’s not what you read before going to bed. It takes energy and attention to ingest and understand. So, I went looking for something a bit easier to read for times I didn’t want to be deeply involved with the material.
I found Brave New Worlds, a collection of short stories about dystopian futures. Each is by a different author. Some of the names are well known, others not. However, I was really pleased by the overall quality of the stories. While a few disappointed, for reasons I explain below, the overall collection was worth my time.
Of course, this title riffs off Huxley’s Brave New World, which is one of my favorite books. I think it’s much better than Orson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four because Huxley says that future totalitarian states will rule by offering mindless pleasure rather than crushing oppression. That isn’t to say that such a future wouldn’t snoop into every corner of life…just that it would do so to manipulate and influence with a carrot rather than a stick.
In Brave New Worlds, the short stories explore other potential futures ruled by adherence to custom, bizarrely distributed justice, heavy fisted oppression, and more.
To give you a sense of what to expect if you find a copy of this collection, the editors decided to start with Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. The stories don’t get any more uplifting after that because, after all, this is a collection of stories about dystopia…not utopia.
Now, in case you hadn’t considered it: dystopian fiction must be social commentary by it’s very nature. It can’t be dystopian (or utopian) unless it is pointing out a tragic flaw of human nature. Huxley, Orwell and all of the others who wrote stories of this nature were pointing out something that we should fear about ourselves and not about the world, crashing asteroids, exploding suns or whatever McGuffin the scifi author jammed into a story to drive a plot.
The problem with this is that some authors spend too much time pointing out what things are bad…things that everybody already knows. This preachy tone is unfortunate; rather than exploring complex issues or the potentially tragic results of the decisions we make, they instead point at some horror or injustice over and over as if we didn’t already know that “freedom is good; oppression is bad”, etc etc etc.
For example, one story revolves around social changes involving women’s reproductive rights. It discusses a future that closely resembles the Taliban led Afghanistan before the war started. However, it’s not much more than that, which squanders an opportunity to explore the complicated nature of the subject. Doing a superficial find-and-replace with a few cultural embellishments or corrections isn’t “commentary” as much as it is “curmudgeonly critique”. A few other stories suffer from similar problems. However, they are the minority.
I picked up a copy for my Kindle and am happy with it. Because it’s a collection, I feel like I can pick it up, read a story, and put it down without being obsessed about finishing one more chapter or finding out what happens next.
And to be honest, given the nature of the stories, it might actually be best to read one at a time with breaks in between. There’s only so many bleak potential futures one can consider in a single day. And now that I think about it, maybe reading these before bed is why I’m having apocalyptic dreams again. Hmmmm….
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I have been told that life is about challenges.
As I started to get excited and assemble the paperwork, I let my parents know that I was getting rid of the rustbucket in exchange for a Mustang.
