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.

Chesapeake by James A. Michener

What an amazing book, one I feel really proud to have finished and that I really learned from.  Chesapeake is the story of Cheseapeake Bay on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, a spit of land split between the states of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware.  The narrative is filtered through the lens of the progress of the fictional town of Patamoke on the Choptank River and the rise of major immigrant families: first the wily watermen Turlocks, the Quaker Paxmores and the Catholic Steeds, joined later by the ex-slave Caters, immigrants Irish Caveneys and German Pflaums .  Michener splits his tale into fourteen journeys, boat journeys that are taken by people relevant to the narrative.  These take place in 1583, 1608, 1636, 1661, 1701, 1773, 1811, 1822, 1832, 1837, 1886, 1938, 1976 and 1978.  In the first we see the Suquehanna Native American Pentaquod come to among the marshes of the Eastern Shore and Michener takes us through the next 400 years until the funeral journey of a son of the area disgraced by his involvement in the Watergate scandal.  In this way Michener narrates the coming of Europe's persecuted to the area, Quakers, Catholics, Irish, and the rise and fall of slavery.  National and world events are touched on but only with relevance to personal history, from resistance in the American War of Independece, fighting in the American Civil War to the north, helping and pursuing runaway slaves on the Underground Railway reach Pennsylvania and the effect of Vietnam and Korea in showing the sons of the area the value of their homeland.  The number of years that Michener places between Journeys allows for history to pass but each new set of people either features an older version of a character seen in a previous Journey or they are still within living memory, allowing the great sweep of years to remain personalised.

A Planet for the President by Alistair Beaton

Absolutely hilarious, I think this is the best satire I have ever read, AZ: "It is the near future and things are not going well for the President of the United States. He wants Americans to be adored by everyone but half the planet seems to be in a permanent state of insurrection against US power. What's more, there's a growing environmental crisis that even he can't ignore. It's one thing when there are floods in Bangladesh, quite another when almost 2,000 Americans die in flooding in Texas. His advisers warn him he could be remembered as the President who wrecked the planet. The President is persuaded of one simple fact: there are too many people in the world. Only radical action can deal with the problem. His advisors come up with a solution more ruthless than anything ever contemplated before. Appalled, the president refuses to go along with their plan. But it isn't long before he is committed to thinking the unthinkable ..."

The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos

AZ: "Spanning the two decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, this is the story of a groups of friends struggling to find work after the war. The friends' lives interact to form a complex pattern that rocks the Italian and Greek communities of Washington DC with violent repercussions."

The magazine Psychologies advised me to step outside my comfort zone and do something spontaneous or differently from the way I usually would, so instead of browsing in the library I reached out and picked a book at random. It was a book I wold never have picked, the blurb about 1950s gangsters in Washington and the Greek community disinterested me even when I read it after reading the book, but I would have missed something amazing. Well plotted and beautifully written, I just could have drowned in his descriptive passages about the shocking reality of immigrant life in 50s DC. The deep joy of being touched by an unknown writer as happened with Shreve. And it's the first of a quadrology!