The City & The City by China Mieville

Two cities,  Beszel, a decaying soviet style society and Ul Qoma, near Eastern in style.  The body of a murdered young girl found in the vandalised playground of a sink estate by Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad [for some reason, annoyingly, Blogger doesn't seem to support accents, but there are acute accents over the first e in Mieville, the second in Beszel and the u in Borlu, which give an indication of the slavic slant of the language of the latter two].  But all is not as it seems, and Mieville's detective story is, Borlu says of his case on page 9, 'considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared'.  I won't give anything away, but the reference to Byzantium, also known as Istanbul and Constantinople over its history, as well as the meaning of 'byzantine' itself give clues to just how much of a ride Mieville takes you on.  Brilliantly conceived and written

POST APOCALYTIC #1
The Postman by David Brin

A fascinating page turner of a book with lots of great ideas but not terribly well written to my mind.  The population of the United States has been decimated by climate shift, disease and bands of insane survivalists.  Gordon Krantz, a lone survivor living a subsistence level existence in the hills of Oregon, is set upon and robbed of all his possessions by a band of men.  He finds the ruined remains of a jeep with a postman inside and takes the clothes, and the role of postman, and becomes an unwilling extraordinary symbol of hope in a particularly dark age.  

DYSTOPIA #5 
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

I seem to be running a pattern of finding the first book by an author amazing and the second disappointing, I think half the problem I had with Do Androids... was that I kept trying to figure out which character was which in the film Bladerunner.  Still very good, and raises good questions about the morality of cybernetics in a radiation riddled world.

DYSTOPIA #4
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

 What if history had run on different tracks?  What if Roosevelt had been assasinated and not led the USA into World War II, what if the North Africa campaign had failed and Rommel succeeded, Stalingrad never happened and the Nazis taken over Europe.  What if Japan had prevailed at Pearl Harbour, the United States fleet destroyed, Japan never made to suffer the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  If Italy had never switched allegiance from Axis to Allies, and instead become a minor ruler in a world split between the might of two empires: Japan and the triumphant Third Reich.  If the USA was partitioned, the Rockies acting as a DMZ between Japan's reticent Buddhist non-violent society on the western seaboard and Germany's agressive Nazism complete with work camps and gas ovens to the East.  Dick imagined this, and the result is an extraordinary mediation on American society and the fragility of history.

DYSTOPIA #3
High-Rise by JG Ballard

A new world in the sky, a forty storey tower block, is the focus of Ballard's most acclaimed book.  Within the block there is everything the residents could need, on the 10th floor is a supermarket, hairdresser's, bank, primary school and large swimming pool, there is a smaller pool, gym, squash courts and restaurant on the 35th.  Elevators speed the residents to their floors, and on the very top is a sculpture park playground for the residents' children.

However, Ballard has created a dozing monster in this world.  As someone who has lived in a tower block, I know how quickly lifts become abused but I was living in a council block and there everyone was of roughly the same income and social status.  In Ballard's tower block the price of the apartments is graded by height creating a microcosm of society, the working classes living from about the ground to the 10th floor, the middle classes from the 11th to about the 35th and the upper classes above that, bands demarcated by the swimming pools.  Families with children live generally below the 10th floor, the spoilt pooches of the upper classes above the 35th.  A ticking bomb of resentments and irritations in this self contained community does not take long to explode, and Ballard exhaustively explores the collusion by the residents and their withdrawal from the outside world, which becomes less real to them than the world of the high-rise.

Personally, I found it too predictable and without the brilliance of The Drowned World, but High-Rise was written in 1975 and needs to be seen in a historical context, that is, it was written before the animalistic excesses of the 80s and arguments that seem tired to me were way ahead of their time.

Black Hole by Charles Burns

A disturbing graphic novel working on two levels.  On one level it's the mid 1970s in suburban Seattle and high school teenagers are doing what they always do, having sex, drinking, taking drugs, taking risks.  But sex and exchange of bodily fluids is spreading a plague which turns the teenagers' bodies into montrosities, some grow tales, some shed their skins, skins blister and morph, and psychoses emerge.  But it is also a classic coming of age story, about first sex and first love, teenage preoccupations of belonging, escape and revenge.  The artwork is brutally simplistic, stark black and white, horribly graphic and trippy.