DYSTOPIA #9
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A sad dystopia of utiliarianism taken to its logical conclusion, to the creation of clones to provide the raw materials for medical experiments and operations, and their fate if they are raised not in a factory but in a boarding school setting.  Explores with delicacy and deep feeling the relations between children raised together and the nature of friendship backed by a morally horrendous premise.

DYSTOPIA #8
Island by Aldous Huxley

Journalist and life long cynic Will Farnaby wakes up to the insistent call 'Attention' after being shipwrecked on the forbidden island of Pala, located geographically somewhere around Bali.  Sent by the head of his paper, oil tycoon Aldehyde, to find out whether Pala will be easy to take over and exploit, Will finds himself in a world where the inner life is cherished and valued and even the birds in the trees have a part to play in reminding the inhabitants of this utopia how best to live and be.   Wonderful and sad.

What If? Mirror Mirror edited by Jennifer Grunwald

A great collection from Marvel that is kind of an answer to DCs Elseworlds collections. 

Hector Espejo, online name The Watcher, is the child of millionaire computer geeks, and first hacked into the Pentagon before he was 10.  Using the net he has discovered a parallel world and each of the six comics in this collection are based on his findings: what if the Fantastic Four were Russian;  what if Prince Namor, Aquman grew up on land, what if Captain America had emerged during the American Civil War, what if Matt Murdock hadn't been Daredevil but instead had had a Japanese ancestor with Daredevil's blindness and fighting skills; what if Wolverine had been a fur trapper forced to cross with Scarface in Chicago during the Prohibition era, and what if Thor had become the herald of Galactacus.  All really well written and fascinating.

Batman: Hong Kong by Doug Moench & Tony Wong

Batman is called to help when a computer hacker comes across a private broadcast of a snuff film of a man being murdered by snake bite and becomes the next vicitim himself.  When a similar murder occurs in Hong Kong he crosses the Pacific to engage with a world of Triads, honour and police at war, and a new ally Night Dragon.

The Authority: Prime by Christos Grace & Darick Robertson

The Authority and StormWatch Prime go head to head in a battle over their former leader Henry Bendix's secret bunker, great mayhem and fight scenes, good story too.

Smokescreen by Dick Francis

Edward Lincoln is a action movie film star, but his family life is quiet, a lovely wife (Charlie) and three children, two sons and a daughter with retarded development due to brain injury.  Nerissa is his substitiute mother, she asks Edward to go to South Africa to find out why her horses are no longer winning and he swiftly becomes embroiled in a thriller to more than equal his films, including three attempts on his life (electrocution, burial in explosion at gold mine and abadonment in car in Kruger National Park), a brilliant calculating killer, entrapment attempts by a beautiful girl and the highest stakes: a gold mine, prizewinning horses and Edward's own life.

Dead Cert by Dick Francis

Life is as normal when amateur jockey Alan York watches his friend Bill Davidson go over the jump in front of him to win the race on Admiral, but then the horse falls crushing his friend beneath him killing him and widowing his wife Scilla, leaving her with three children.  Alan goes back to the course and sees wire strung across the top of the fence and reporting it to the police engages with a dangerous underworld which revolves around love interest Kate Ellery-Penn, orphaned and raised by her upper class aunt and uncle and the said uncle's secret life.  Ends with a fantastic manhunt in the forests and woods around the racecourse with Alan on Admiral pitted against a gang of taxi drivers come tough guys with orders to kill.

Bonecrack by Dick Francis

Neil Griffon takes over the training of horses at his father's stable after his father is hospitalised with a broken leg.  He is visited by vicious sociopathic crime boss Enso Riviera who has only one aim, to make Neil put his son Alessandro the jockey on Archangel the favourite for the Derby, by any means necessary.  Griffon's head lad is Etty Craig, great female character.  Neil takes on Alessandro and a dangerous game begins, Neil trying to keep his life and his father's stables alive under paternal pressure that he does not know what he's doing.  Set in Newmarket.  Ends with attempted shooting of stable lead jockey Tommy Hoylake on Newmarket Heath.

High Stakes by Dick Francis

Trainer Jody Leeds, father Quintin Leeds, Jockey Club member, is fleecing owner Steven Scott, when his horse Energise wins unexpectedly Steven is sure of his trainer's guilt and complicity with Ganser Mays, bookmaker in ringing (subsitituting identical horses, 'dead ringers', for the horses supposed to be running).  Steven has made a fortune making beautiful toys. Friend is Charlie Canterfield, merchant banker.  Steven has workshop in house and assistant come butler is Owen Idris.  Love interest beautiful intelligent American Alexandra Ward (Allie).  Steven realises Engerise has been swopped and decides to get him back, gets badly beaten but gets Energise back with a ringer scam of his own.

DYSTOPIA #7
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Herman Hesse

Like nothing I've ever read before.  The presumably fictional but utterly convincing biography of Joseph Knecht, the man who in the 23rd Century becomes Magister Ludi (Master of the Game) in the Kingdom of Castalia, an elite community who preserved the integrity of humanity when it dissolved into anarchy and dangerous superficiality centuries earlier.  Castalian's are the intellectual elite of their society but they no longer create, rather they study earlier cultural achievement and play the Glass Bead Game, a game that is never completely defined but appears to be an intellectual exercise in pure brilliance of the mind.  The Glass Bead Game taught me a lot both about the need for me to become more centred and the value of meditation, and also the implicit dangers of intellectualism and seperatism.

DYSTOPIA #6
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson (AUDIO)

A really good listen and really thought provoking although a bit too much in the spirit of a boy's own adventure, the protagonist Thomas Parry never seems to really get hurt through all the danger and troubles he comes across in this dystopia come picaresque.

Parry is taken from his home in the dead of night at the age of 8 and taken to a school where he is indoctrinated into the new world order.  The UK has been redesignated as four separate kingdoms according to the humour of the individual.

The Red Quarter is for sanguine people, optimistic, outgoing and easily distracted, the Yellow for cholerics, quick to anger, passionate, the Green for melancholics, the thoughful depressives, and the Blue for phlegmatics, flexible easy going natured. 

Parry becomes a true servant of the regime, entering the civil service and being sent to a diplomatic in the blue quarter, but then he goes to a strange nightclub which brings back memories of his past and goes on the run, travelling through the various Quarters and even becoming a White person, a person who fits in no Quarter but travels between them, before finally returning to the Red Quarter a very changed man. 

Thomson shows through Parry's experiences that dividing humours negates the countering effects one humour can have on another, and does not allow for the ultimate aim of the theory of humours, that is, that we should recognise which humour is most dominant in ourselves, that is true, but that a truly balanced or humoured individual is one in which the humours are balanced, and therefore tearing apart the fabric of society cannot be right.