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“Utopias are boring. Dystopias, on the other hand, are interesting.” – Robert Silverberg
The outside world has become unforgiving; your only hope for survival is to live deep underground. Those who long for a chance to experience the unknown are given the worst sentence: They are sent to experience the cruelties of the world outside. Hugh Howey makes the dangers of the outdoors a reality in his bestselling Wool series. The success of the series has inspired renewed interest in dystopian fiction, so we’ve gathered a collection of novels that we think you will enjoy as much as Wool.
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Clik here to view.Written nearly forty years before Howey’s series, William Hjortsberg’s Gray Matters explores similar themes to Wool, which even Hjortsberg noticed upon the book’s release. Gray Matters confronts the possibility of immortality in a future after the devastation of World War III. Here, dead brains are preserved for the possibility of a second life. Although the brains spend their time in relative peace, training for the day they can return to a body and a peaceful existence, the facility’s most famous resident, Skeets Kalbfleischer, is creating problems. Killed in a plane crash at twelve years old, Skeets still dreams of being a cowboy, disrupting plans for creating an enlightened, zen race.
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Clik here to view.Robert Silverberg takes mind control to new levels with his novels. To Live Again imagines a future in which humans are able to live forever—as part of someone else’s mind. These transplants never fully take over human bodies, but “consult” with their hosts, offering their personas and thoughts. But this harmonious arrangement takes a sinister turn when the mind of Paul Kaufmann, the richest and most powerful man on Earth, become available and the desire to have it results in a deadly race for those who want to make the most out of their mortal lives. The Second Trip details a future where capital punishment is foregone in favor of erasing a criminal’s personality—and replacing it with an artificially constructed personality that can be useful to society. Just released from therapy, Paul Macy quickly realizes that his old personality, rapist Nat Hamlins, has not been successfully repressed. Despite Paul’s best efforts to block out Nat, he continues to emerge, and is intent on erasing Paul, even if it means killing both of them in the process.
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Clik here to view.Each story in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild & Other Storiesrevolves around dystopian worlds, but the title story puts a twist in dealing with body possession. Rather than humans trying to extend their lives, their bodies are used as tools to extend the lives of their alien overlords. On a foreign planet, human children are raised to become hosts for the offspring of the Tlic alien species. They are led to believe it is a painless process, and it is presented as a privilege. When one human finally realizes the barbarity of becoming a host, he must decide whether to fight for all of humanity, or for his own well-being.
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Clik here to view. William Shatner’s TekWarseries takes drug dealing to new and futuristic heights. Jim Cardigan, one of Los Angeles’s toughest cops in the 22nd century, no longer gets a high from bringing justice to the streets. Instead he turns to Tek, an illegal computerized brain stimulant that allows his greatest fantasies to become his reality. He quickly becomes addicted—and falsely convicted of dealing the stimulant. He is sentenced to fifteen year of suspended animation and stripped of his badge, but he is awakened four years later and becomes entangled in the search for the real Tek lords.
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Clik here to view.In Ellen Datlow’s Alien Sexanthology we find a raunchy dystopian story that doubles as social commentary. The story Passengers has both lust and tragedy. Humans exist under the threat of the “Passengers” beings that are able to temporarily take over bodies and wreak havoc on society. Because a person can be taken any time, people avoid relationships and when people are being “ridden,” the rest of society ignores them. When a victim is released, he has no memory of the incident and others never mention his antics. But as with all foolproof plans, there is always a hitch. The narrator of the story can remember being ridden, and he fights against the accepted norms to connect with a fellow victim he remembers during his ride.
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Clik here to view.Like Gray Matters, Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong explores the dangers of human engineering for selfish reasons, and its disastrous results. Wendy Wanders has been augmented with the ability to tap into patients’ emotions and memories for the sake of “therapy.” Although she was autistic as a child, she has been “fixed” to the point where she is highly empathic—but not entirely cured. When the lab she is housed in is attacked, she escapes with a lab assistant, but finds the outside world is not much better.
We hope that these ebooks will satisfy the craving for dystopian fiction that Wool has undoubtedly created. And while these classics may have imagined a world that still does not exist, who knows what will come in the next century . . .