Posts Tagged by dystopia
The Shape of Things to Come
| August 2, 2012 | Posted by Fergus Doyle under culture |
Dystopias are funny, aren’t they? They started off as a pessimistic response to the optimistic utopias of the later stages of the 19th century, they flourished in the darker parts of the first half of the 20th century and now they come in all shapes and sizes. For the majority of the time they focus on the authors’ own personal fears – for example, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is something of a reaction to the ultra-feminists of the 1970s, the fears of the cold war era, and a history of unfair relations between men and women – or as a vehicle for the authors to satirise their contemporaries, such as G K Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1908… more
The Hunger Games
| March 25, 2012 | Posted by Sep Gohardani under entertainment, reviews |
Film Information: Released March 23, 2012; Certificate 12A Cast: Jennifer Lawrence; Josh Hutcherson; Liam Hemsworth; Woody Harrelson; Elizabeth Banks; Lenny Kravitz; Wes Bentley; Isabelle Fuhrman; Willow Shields; Donald Sutherland; Paula Malcomson Director: Gary Ross Screenwriters: Gary Ross; Billy Ray; Suzanne Collins (author of source text) Running Time: 142 Minutes Plot At an unspecified date in the future the ruins of North America have become the nation of Panem, a dystopian, dictatorial land that dealt with an uprising and is making the different districts of the country pay for this insolence by organising a “reaping,” or raffle, which selects one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the twelve districts of the country to compete… more
Should I read… Death Note?
| March 6, 2012 | Posted by Emma French under should I read...? |
I thought that this week I would consider something a bit different from the usual reading recommendations you get from friends. If you are working through a busy period of your life – perhaps exams, or, like me, a mammoth lump of coursework – you don’t always have time for a novel like Captain Corelli with its 500 pages and mighty-small text. And at those points, you can’t always be bothered either. After marathon research periods spent staring at textbooks, a serious classic novel feels a bit too much like hard work. So, while I’m not advocating manga as a replacement to a good novel, it is a good alternative if you want a lot of action and less reading.… more
Should I read… Never Let Me Go?
| February 22, 2012 | Posted by Emma French under should I read...? |
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is an example of a subtle type of dystopian novel – one which never completely acknowledges its dystopian genre and instead acts as if what happens in the book is completely normal. Unlike traditional favourites like 1984, there is nothing overtly sinister about the world which Kathy inhibits; if anything, it goes more to the other end of the spectrum, where everything is eerily perfect and only trivialities begin to shake the reader’s view of the world being normal. And in fact, the world is completely normal – no dictators, secret police, robots, drone-like working conditions – and only one thing in Ishiguro’s world differs from our own: science has been able to… more
Before I Go to Sleep: a review
| January 11, 2012 | Posted by Alaa Jasim under culture, reviews |
Before I go to Sleep by SJ Watson is a book I only recently discovered, but it’s one of those books that I’m glad I had time to read. Though the contents of the blurb, as shown below, are rather dramatic, I thought it was a great read – so here is my review of Watson’s début novel. Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love – all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine’s life. Labelled as “crime thriller of the year,” I had high hopes for Before I go to… more
Should I read… The Chrysalids?
| December 22, 2011 | Posted by Emma French under should I read...? |
I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction, from young adult favourites such as The Hunger Games to the classics of Orwell and Huxley, but The Chrysalids by science fiction legend John Wyndham (see Day of the Triffids) is a new favourite of mine for how it doesn’t focus on a huge struggle against authority, but rather much smaller battles on a more minute scale – the book centres on the children of a tiny village in a future where a disaster has caused humans to revert back to more primitive, provincial roots. The story is narrated by ten-year-old David Strorm, who has been bought up in a claustrophobically Christian fundamentalist society, and whose god-fearing world is based on one attribute… more
Should I read… Cloud Atlas?
| November 15, 2011 | Posted by Emma French under should I read...? |
So, I think I’ve been writing long enough to hopefully have built an audience (i.e. the two or three friends I force to read this) that I can trust with the gift that is my favourite book of all time: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. This book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, is a book which seems to defy all the rules of structure, and in doing so makes a story that you can’t stop reading – because, while the novel is separated into six separate tales focussing around several protagonists, the stories are also split in half, with the first half and second half separated by all the others’ stories. Creating a sort of Chinese box narrative,… more
