More Than This by Patrick Ness

A boy drowns in the cold ocean.  To begin with we know little about him beyond the brutality of his death, but details begin to emerge and we learn about teenage boy Seth's life in America.  His circle of friends and growing love for one of them, his brother Owen, damaged by a terrible incident in the boys' childhood, his emotionally distant mother and medicated father. His life before his death.

But Seth wakes somewhere else, a place beyond his death.  He is alone in the English town and house he lived in until he was 8 and the terrible thing happened to Owen.  The town is overrun with weeds and in places a burnt wasteland.  Is this his personal hell, purgatory, or something else?

Ness never lets the reader stand on firm ground, making us ask questions about what we know to be real and our relationship with reality and technology.

Fractured by Teri Terry

The second book in the Slated trilogy opens with Kyla shivering in the aftermath of the trauma of having attacked a man.  She was only defending herself, however, she has beaten him nearly to death and as a Slated it should not be possible.  Slated's are under 16s that have had their minds and personalities wiped, and they wear a device called a Levo that monitors their mood and if they show signs of agression render them unconsious, even kills them.  It began as a utopian idea, in the aftermath of civil unrest Slating was an alternative to execution.  But Kyla's memories are beginning to return, another things that is not supposed to happen.  There is a man with pale blue eyes at her school, he is supposed to be a teacher but isn't.  Kyla grieves for Ben, the boy she lost in Slated when he cut his Levo off and was last seen being dragged off by the Lorders, the martial police of this new world. Kyla begins to remember and her memories are fractured, of a girl called Rain, of a girl called Lucy, and what exactly was done to her.  She finds herself torn between the new family she has been assigned, her past and her sense of right and wrong. 

An enjoyable read, just don't expect too much from it.  Many of the themes aren't new, a dystopian world with lots of twists and turns, but it is a good ride.

Slated by Teri Terry

Kyla is on her way out of New London Hospital to a new family.  Her memories and personality have been wiped clean.  She is a blank slate with no knowledge of the past that caused her to have her mind wiped, and whether it was voluntary or forced on her.  What she does know is that this is her last chance.  Attached to her wrist is her Levo, a device that measures her mood and renders her unconscious, even dead, if she becomes angry or agitated.

Kyla goes to school with her new sister Amy and tries desperately to adjust to life in a stratified society where Slateds are outcasts.  She makes a friend in Ben, also a Slated. But something is wrong, Kyla finds anger rising up inside her and her Levo unreactive.  Dreams and surfacing memories plague her, and even her new mum and dad are not what they seem.

Fast paced with a warm heart and thriller storyline.  The Slated idea is a natural extension of what most teens feel, that they do not fit in the world they inhabit.  A good read.

Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters by Sam Thompson

A hallucinogenic book.  Thompson presents us with 10 chapters, each a different character describing their experiences in a city almost like any other great city: of slums, murders, subway stations, warren-like alleys and bright public façades.  The Flâneur of Glory Port - a Jack-the-Ripper type bogeyman - and deformed mutants haunt the shadows in many of the stories.  The narrators vary in widely in social position and the stories in timbre.  A hard-boiled detective speaks as if channelling Sam Spade, another Sherlock Holmes.  Slaughtermen, immigrants, reclusives, automatons, all speak and reveal a different city, one that is just slightly futuristic, tangible, chilling and mesmerising.

After the Snow by SD Crockett

Willo is alone, hiding in the snow on the mountain above his home. His family are gone, his father, stepmother, brothers and sisters dragged away by strangers.

As Willo's speaks in his own demotic speech his life takes shape before us. Willo is very unusual in being born on the edge of the Welsh mountain he is hiding on. Most people live in what is left of the cities but he is a 'straggler', a person living on the edges of a diminished society. We are not too far in the future, global warming has caused the Atlantic currents to shut down resulting in the Snowball Earth scenario - Britain is covered by snow which only thaws for a very brief period in the summer time. Willo has been taught by his father to survive in these extreme neo Ice Age conditions, to hunt, set snares, make furs and clothing from them.

Willo gathers his courage and goes in search of his lost family, aquiring Mary, abandoned by her father, and struggling to survive in the much altered city of Manchester. He navigates his way haphazardly through a host of characters Dickensian in their suffering in an anarchic city teetering on the edge of total disaster: an old couple sewing fur coats for the rich with a secret utopian hope; a ratcatcher who gives Willo and Mary shelter for the night; an impossibly rich beautiful woman living in luxury; and roaming gangs of brutal inebriated enforcers and feral children. Resistance to the authorities is swiftly crushed, and when Willo finds himself betrayed by the one person he trusted most all seems lost. But there is always hope.

I really enjoyed Crockett's book. Willo's idiosyncratic speech mannerisms bring to life a young man on the edge of adulthood unwillingly promoted from pack member to lone wolf. His wildness and connection with the landscape are vividly communicated, as is the bleak possible future we all face if our climate does fail. I found Willo's choices brave, his struggle between his survivalist 'dog' mind and his deep humanity compelling. Crockett's plotting is brave, she doesn't allow for improbable happy endings and Willo has to endure terrible horrors to become the person his father raised him to be, a 'beacon of hope'.

A perfect dystopia, in that it made me reflect on the present but wasn't completely pessamistic, there was hope that perhaps humanity can do better than just devolve into savagery

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Waverley is sixteen, the eldest of the daughters born in space to the crew of the starship Empyrean, a mission of last hope travelling from the poisoned Earth in search of a new world to colonise. Kieran, the eldest boy, has just asked her to marry him and she is considering his fumbling proposal and the presence within the fog of the nebula through which they are passing of their sister ship, the New Horizon.  The ship launched a year before the Empyrean, she should be much further ahead and and their captains are in closeted heated discussion.  There seems no cause for disagreement, both ships contain vast domes of crops and livestock providing them with all the food, oxygen and water they need.  But the Empyrean does have something the New Horizon does not, the children.  As Waverley finds herself prisoner on the sister ship and Kieran one of the boys left without any adults on the Empyrean both struggle for survival and their characters emerge along the way.  This is a good read, but I felt the plotting was a little heavy handed at times, the theme of religious and xenophobic intolerance could have been handled with more subtlety.

Akira Volume 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

Kaneda is a disaffected rebellious teenage boy growing up in dystopian 2030 Neo-Tokyo, a city built around a crater of destruction from the massive detonation that exploded in the heart of Tokyo at 2.17pm on December the 6th 1992.  He leads his gang of anarchic motorcyling teenage delinquents breaking into the zone of destruction and his friend Tetsuo is badly wounded as they crash trying to avoid a mysterious wrinkled faced child who disappears.  Tetsuo is taken away by mysterious forces and return to their school for out of control teens strangely changed.  A wild adventure of gang warfare, underground resistance, a beautiful girl and awesome psychic powers begins, a 360 page long but absorbing fabulous ride.

Divergent by Veronica Roth


It is the near future, and society has divided itself into 5 factions to avoid the conflict that lead to war. 'Those who blamed agression formed Amity ... those who blamed duplicity formed Candor ... those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite ... those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation ... and those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless'.

Beatrix Prior is an Abnegation, she tries her hardest to selfless, free from anger and put others first, but she finds it hard, she is angry much of the time.  At 16 every child of the factions has to choose the faction they will live in for the rest of their lives, and those who choose a faction other than the one they were raised in face ostracism from their birth family.

Roth cleverly combines an allegory of the difficult choices any teenager has to make about where they fit and about first love with an excellent fact paced plot, a book I found difficult to put down and was disappointed to finish.

Similar to Divided Kingdom but for a teenage audience

The Future is Queer by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel

A good collection of stories and one piece of graphic fiction by a variety of authors, all queer visions of the future for GLTBs.  As with all good science fiction, each story reflects on a different aspect of gay or lesbian society and issues such as identity by differentiation from the 'norm', self esteem and how a sense of self is refracted through the lens of sexuality.  Thought provoking and interesting.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

6 year old Amy is abandoned by her desperate mother with a group of nuns after killing a trick who was taking her to a fraternity house.  Deep in the mountains of Colorado army scientists are trialling use of a virus found in the jungles of Columbia to create supersoldiers of immense strength, bloodthirstiness and longevity, vampires in all but name.  After 12 subjects the scientists want a new subject, they want Amy, and after treatment she becomes something new.  Inevitably the worst happens, the 12 get loose and turn everyone they bite into one of them, 'smokes', 'virals' or 'dracs'.  The United States turns apocalyptic.

Move forward a century, Peter lives in a fortified community, he has never seen the stars because at night floodlights are switched on all round the perimiter to keep the smokes at bay.  He is one of the Watch and is waiting for the return of his brother, taken up by the smokes on a visit to the generators.  For some reason, the smokes always come home.

This could have been a brilliant dystopia, it has elements of Shymalan's 'The Village' and good post apocalyptic novels but the characters aren't well deliniated, apart from Amy and ex-nun Lacey they all blended together for me.  There are too many cliches, vampires rule the world and humans become just meat, mad scientists ruin the world, etc etc.  Disappointing ultimately

Grandville by Bryan Talbot

One of my favourite graphic novels of all time is Talbot's harrowing tale of homelessness, child abuse and Beatrix Potter, One Bad Rat. Grandville doesn't disappoint, an amazing tale of a future with reference ton the works of French charicaturist JJ Gerard, science fiction illustrator Robida, Conan Doyle, Rupert the Bear, Tarantino and Herge.  In this dystopia Napoleon won, the French rule Britain as a backwater annex and the 'people' have mostly animal heads, with the exception of a few humans, an underclass known as 'dough faces'.  The badger faced Detective Inspector Lebrock of Scotland Yard stars with his Watson type Detective Ratzi, a return to Talbot to his love of the intelligence and talent of rats as seen in One Bad Rat.  I loved the use of animals to denote character or the surface appearance of, and his use of Snowy Milou is genius, particularly his opium addled dreams in the Blue Lotus house of Tintin's trip to the Moon.

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.

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.

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.

DYSTOPIA #2 
The Drowned World by JG Ballard

Every time I read Ballard I am struck by how utterly brilliant, scarily accurate and chilling his writing is, whether speaking about our contemporary world or an imagined future.  In The Drowned World Ballard imagines a future where solar flares have destabilised the sun, burning off our ionosphere and causing the Earth's temperature to soar, melting the polar ice caps, flooding much of the land mass and returning life on the planet to Paleozoic conditions.  Under these conditions vegeation returns to tropical and swampy and reptiles and gigantic insects replace mammals as the dominant species.  Dr Kerans is part of a scientific expedition sent from mankind's last outpost in the Arctic to map the new geography of the flooded planet, a futile effort as the sun's temperature continues to increase and floods and storms change the shape of the land.  His narrative tells of the descent of the psyches of the expedition crew from their apex of evolution back down into their evoluationary past, reminding us as the best dystopias do of the flaws of our so-called civilization and the fragility of our dominance over the planet.