Paradise

Morrison, Toni. Paradise, New York : A. A. Knopf 1998.

When freed slaves established the town of Haven during Reconstruction, they hoped to create a new world free of the tyranny and oppression of their former lives. Fast forward to the 1970s, and a group of men from that colony have set out to reconnect with the original principals of the forefathers, re-establishing their idea of paradise-on-earth, in the all-African American town of Ruby. However, the town's internal balance is disturbed when a group of women, under the leadership of enigmatic leader Consolata, take root in a local convent, attracting the sympathy of some of the town's women. The patriarchal leaders find their authority undermined, and in the process are forced to contemplate the contradictions of their own position at the apex of a hierarchy that was supposed to challenge power-relations in the first place. Written by a Nobel-lauriette, Paradise is an intricate examination of the human desire for freedom, and what happens when it comes up against the limits of authority, set to the backdrop of the social turmoil of the Vietnam era.

A Country Called Home

Barnes, Kim. A country called home, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2008.

When recently graduated doctor Thomas Deracotte takes his young wife Helen to the countryside of Idaho, the couple embark on dreams of a rural idyll, leaving civilisation behind to establish a 'back-to-the-land' existence (fitting with the decade of the novel's setting, the 1960's). However, utopias are not so simple, and human weaknesses intrude to complicate matters between the couple, whose relationship strain is exarcebated  by a growing bond between Helen and the young drifter-cum-farmhand Deracotte has hired to do the heavy-lifting on the farm, Manny. Meanwhile, the arrival of a newly-born daughter, Elise, and Thomas' descent from a physician to something of a 'wild-man' outcast, further complicates matters and tips the balance away from harmony. Pullitzer prize-holder Barne's narrative is dark and brooding, and deeply rooted in the natural setting in which it takes place. 

Herland

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland, New York : Signet Classic, [1992].

Led by sociology student Vandyk Jennings (Van), a group of explorers set out to find a mythical society composed entirely of women, supposedly hidden in the jungles of South America. Upon discovering the tribe, the men try to observe them from afar, but are lured to their village, where they are captured, accomodated and made to learn the tribe's language, culture and history. The men learn that the tribe have subsisted in isolation since inter-tribal warfare and a volcanic eruption destroyed their civilisation (and all its men) 2000 years ago, and has mastered a form of asexual reproduction. Following a foiled escape-attempt, the men are gradually afforded more freedom, as they apply themselves to proper membership of the tribe, its rites and relationships. 

Gilman's novel -serialised in 1916- has been described as an early feminist epic that inverts gender-roles, which are depicted as socially-contingent; her positioning of the novel's women as both nurturing, and fiercely independent and physically hardy, enables her to unpick several gender stereotypes, and question many of the assumptions underpinning our understanding of gender and gender-relations.

Looking Backward : 2000-1887.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking backward : 2000-1887, Cambridge, Mass : Belknap Press, 1967.

It is 2000, and Julin West has awoken from a deep-sleep began in his native Boston over one hundred years ago, to find himself in an alien United States. His hypnotic sleep has propelled him into a socialist utopia more than 100 years into the future, where all his questions and confusion about the society surrounding him are helpfully answered by the attentive Doctor Leete.

Leete shows West through modern-day Boston, and explains the many changes that have made much of the drudgery and oppression of the capital-labour relationship a thing of the past. Workers retire at 45 now, may eat in any public kitchen they chose, can consume public art and objective, publicly owned media (both in the press and at home, via 'cable telephone'), and shop on state-provided credit at co-operatives that have done away with the profit-motive.

Bellamy's political treatise was extremely popular, and led to the establishment of over one hundred clubs to propagate its ideas, throughout America's industrial north at the end of the 19th century. The book also influenced such great American labour figures as Eugene Debs, and inspired a series of replies and parodies.

Brave New World

Huxley, Aldus. Brave new world, New York : Harper and Collins, 1998.

Aldus Huxley's Brave New World mixes elements of science fiction and philosophy to examine a series of characters living in a unified, futuristic totalitarian state. Society is rigorously divided from conception, with people's roles set out through interference in their embryonic development, which takes place in the form of in-vitro fertilisation. 'Alphas' and 'Betas' are accorded a higher status, and developed to work in more challenging, intellectual roles, while 'Gammas', 'Deltas' and 'Epsilons' are consigned to lower-class positions.

Bernard and Helmholtz, a couple of Alphas, are somewhat independent-minded, and suspicious of the lack of emotion embodied by their society's obsession with obsequious consumption, drug-taking and excessive, orgiastic physical-pleasure seeking. At the same time, Bernard is compelled by the desire for acceptance, reflected in his obsession with fellow-Alpha, Lenina. A trip to the 'wilds' of the Nevadan desert bring them in to contact with an altogether different form of society, where people are more inter-dependent, emotionally-attached, and less frivolous. They bring an outcast 'savage', John, back with them, both for the purposes of anthropological investigation, and, in the case of Bernard, cynical self-aggrandisement. Trouble ensues when John's inherent dislike for all the trashy amusement's of his 'brave new world' brings him into conflict with the dictates of The World State, and its ruling clique and ethos, embodied by Resident World Controller Mustapha Mond.

Lord of the Flies

Golding, William. Lord of the flies, New York : Coward-McCann 1955, c1954.

A plane transporting a group of British children to asylum during wartime crashes onto a tropical island, leaving the troupe of minors to fend for themselves. The exigencies of survival and escape are quickly disrupted as cliques emerge and civil order breaks down. While Ralph, the group's nominal leader, strives to maintain unity and actively pursues rescue from passing vessels, his rival alpha-male protagonist, Jack, coheres a tribal gathering of boys who hunt for food, and violently assert their dominance over anyone they perceive as weak or unusual.

Golding's book provides an allegorical warning of the drift towards tyranny and savagery that otherwise 'civilised' people may encounter when freed from social constraints and hierarchies. It fits well into the dystopian genre.

On The Beach

Shute, Neville. On the beach, London ; Melbourne : William Heinemann, 1959.

Shute's best-seller, set after a nuclear war, was written in the context of a massive cold-war arms race, with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fresh in the minds of readers. As the radioactive fallout of the global conflagration slowly seeps out from the war's hotspots, the action zeroes in on the people of Melbourne, whose southerly latitude ensures that they will be among the last survivors. Different ways of coping with the knowledge of certain death are examined, from the hedonistic to the macabre and suicidal.

Meanwhile, the last remaining submarine from the US fleet is dispatched to investigate a mysterious signal it has picked up, and the possibility that other parts of the world have escaped the fallout. Shute's characters acceptance of their imminent doom is worthy of study in and of itself: it strongly contrasts to the tendency of the protagonists of much dystopic fiction to rage against their inevitable downfall.

The Millennium : A Comedy of the Year 2000

Sinclair, Upton. The millennium : a comedy of the year 2000, New York : Seven Stories, 2000.

Written at a time when socialism had mass-support across the USA, Sinclair's Millennium explores the two divergent paths humanity might take at the turn of the millennium. It's the year 2000, and America's corporate oligarchs live hermetically sealed off from the rest of society, upon whose exploitation and oppression their dominance rests. When a nuclear cataclysm wipes all but a tiny network of individuals out, the survivors are left to figure how to rebuild human civilisation.

At this point Sinclair poses an alternative to the robber-baron capitalism he had previously exposed in The Jungle. The group splits, with one faction deciding to pursue the status-quo - a society built on the whims of the individual, which takes on ever-grotesque proportions; meanwhile, the other group pursues a commonwealth of co-operative human endevour. Which of the two will prevail?

Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451, New York : Simon & Schuster 1993, c1953.

Bradbury's cold-war tour-de-force tells the story Montag, whose job as a fireman in this futuristic dystopia requires that he extinguish all vestiges of history, critical thought and meanigful artistic contemplation: by burning books. Upon meeting the whimsical and unique Clarisse, Montag starts to question the values of his job, wife and society-at-large. Counterposed to his wife's indulgence in mundane appliances and psychotropic drugs, which forestall any nuanced interaction with the world around her, Montag is increasingly attracted to the refined intellectuality embodied by Clarisse, and retired English professor, Faber. Moreover, his attraction becomes subversive as he crosses the line from enforcing conformity to struggling against it, by illicitly collecting books. 

Will Montag survive to merge his intellectual curiosity with his intense desire for a civilisation based on rational reflection and discussion? And what path will this struggle take him on? The vividly depicted landscapes and characters he comes across on his voyage will draw the reader in from the start - and Bradbury's accurate predictions on the course and effect of technology on the human spirit reinforce his mastery of the sci-fi genre.

The Road

McCarthy, Cormac. The road, New York : Knopf 2006.

McCarthy's best-seller is set on an earth whose lunar surface (under perennially grey skies) is home to the last vestiges of humanity. Among roving bands of scavengers and cannibalistic gangs, a man and his son set out on a testing voyage to the sea, and hopefully salvation. Among the way, McCarthy examines what it means to preserve oneself and all one loves (embodied by the protective relationship between the father and the son), while pragmatically sacrificing moral scruples to the demands of survival.

The Road earned McCarthy a slew of awards (including the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), and its treatment of filial love and the human survival instinct is a must-read for connoisseurs of the post-apocalyptic.

Ready Player One

Cline, Ernest. Ready player one, New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.

It's 2044, and impoverished, marginalised youth Wade Watts escapes his day-to-day slum-existence in the world of OASIS, a cyberspace gaming platform created by a 1980's-obsessed geak-cum-millionaire software programmer, James Halliday. However, this is no ordinary game - the player who can find their way through the maze of armed avatars, corporate mercenaries and platform-obstacles will inherit Halliday's considerable fortune. This coming-of-age story pitches Wade and his avatar pals as the good guys, as they take on loners, chancers and heavily-armed agents of IOI, a corporation that is seeking to privatise OASIS and monopolise its booty for itself. Cline slices his themes of trust, identity and avarice together with a healthy respect for the primitive digital aesthetic of 1980's video-games and pop-culture, so this is one for both young-adult readers, and gen-Xers looking to indulge in a little nostalgic navel-gazing.

Ball Peen Hammer

Rapp, Adam, O'Connor, George & Sycamore, Hilary. Ball peen hammer, New York : First Second, 2009.

Set in a post-apocalyptic urban nightmare, three adults are manipulated by a distant, yet all-pervasive government to carry out its ghoulish designs to stay in power. As they struggle with the moral implications of their involvement in this plan, each expresses a desire to renew their human decency - through an attachment to art, companionship, nurturing the sick, or pursuing a long-lost affair.

Sycamore's dark illustrations take up where O'Connor's narrative subtly leaves off, producing a dark work of graphic fiction that will appeal to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction of all stripes.

Animal Farm

Orwell, George. Animal farm, New York : Random House, 1993.

Sitting alongside 1984 in terms of brilliance, Animal Farm is Orwell's first scathing satire of political tyranny, partially inspired by his observations of Stalinism while fighting alongside anarchists and Trotskyists during the Spanish Civil War. On the advice of the wise pig, Old Major, and chafing under the oppression of slave-like working conditions, the animals of Manor Farm rise up and drive their human boss out. However, an initial period of revolutionary rejoicing is interrupted by division over the way forward, and the eventual exile of one of the early leaders of the revolution, Snowball. Orwell's historically inspired fable keenly reflects on the corrosive influence of power, beautifully expressing the importance of vigilance in the face of corrupt leadership.

The Foundation Pit

Platonov, Andrey. The foundation pit, New York: Harvill, 1996.

A satire on the ultimate futility of Soviet 'progress', The Foundation Pit follows the attempted construction of a model apartment block for the accomodation of workers, bureacrats and party chieftains in Soviet Russia. Supposed to represent the apogee of Soviet progress, the project becomes mired in hopeless bureaucracy, political intrigue and dogmatic sloganeering and conformity. In the end, little is left of the planners efforts - save the hole of the book's title. Having fought for the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, Platanov sought an outlet for his disgust at at Stalinism's destruction of the Russian Revolution. The result (though unpublished during his lifetime), was The Foundation Pit - a compelling read that earns its place among the classics of modern Russian literature.

Soul City : A Novel

Toure. Soul city : a novel, New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2004.

When magazine journalist Jackson Cadillac travels to Soul City, a geographically isolated community in the US established by flying slaves, he falls for the girl (and society) of his dreams. Soulfully colourful vignettes abound as Mahogany (Jackson's muse, an in-house DJ working in a neighbourhood biscuit-shop) shows the protagonist a society where people-of-colour are free to be themselves, music seeps from every crack in the pavement, and doses of soulful salvation are doled out as thick as a steamy gumbo at the local church, St Pimp's House of Baptist Rapture. Toure's fable is an artful counter-position of human liberation -as embodied in Soul City, to dystopic decay, embodied by black existence in the rest of modern America. Frequent-flyers on the P-Funk's Mothership Connection will most definitely turn on to this voyage - can you dig it?

The Dispossessed : An Ambiguous Utopia

Le Guin, Ursula. The dispossessed : an ambiguous Utopia, New York : Harper and Row, 1974.

Le Guin's sci-fi political allegory follows idealistic anarchist physicist, Shevek, who utilises scientific innovation to reconcile his colonial satellite planet, Annares, with its mother-planet, Urras. The book covers much territory familiar to the utopian/dystopian genre, including the influence of science on humanity, relations between the powerful and the oppressed, and the theme of human liberation from social and political tyranny.

White Mars

Aldiss, Brian Wilson. White Mars, New York: St. Martin's Press 2000, c1999.

It's the mid 21st century AD, and Mars has been colonised by the powerfull EUPACUS corporation. As they explore and exploit its natural resources, and inch towards total planetary ownership, economic crisis on earth brings the plan (and civilisation on earth itself) undone, positioning the pioneers on Mars as humanity's last hope. Aldiss intersperses polemical, political debates among the colonisers (led by physicist Tom Jefferies) with observations on  the application of knowledge and technology to the project of human progress (the book was contributed to physicist Sir Roger Penros, and international law expert Laurence Lustgarten), making this novel part fiction, part philosophical/sociological treatise.

A Modern Utopia

Wells., H. G. A modern utopia, New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

As two hikers from our world walk through the Swiss Alps, they find themselves transported through time and space to a parallel universe. They come across an assortment of different characters, from a member of the bureaucratic caste that rules this strange world, a factory supervisor, students, small business-people and a host of criminals and social outcasts. Wells uses his characterisations and the narrator's observations to expound his model of a flawed alternative to our world, where many of his own political predilections, from an advance in the status of women, to his disturbing advocacy of eugenics, are given expression.

This book is a must for the student of history interested in the sort of 'utopia' being advocated among the social-democratic left of the early 20th-century (Wells was a prominent Fabian); it also provides dark hints of the sorts of totalitarian politics that Orwell came to so effectively repudiate in his later dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984.

1984

Orwell, George. 1984, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1984, c1949

Set in a bleak future where individual will, thought and imagination are subordinated to the needs of 'The Party' (and its omniscient leader, Big Brother), Orwell's 1984 is a classic work of Dystopian fiction. The third-person narrative follows outer-party member and Ministry of Truth propagandist Winston Smith, as he grapples to oppose the dictates Big Brother, joins what he believes to be a conspiratorial resistance cell, and ultimately has to chose between his love for Julia (who also is not all she appears to be), his opposition to the status-quo, and his own survival. 

Orwell's masterpiece has been so successful as to generate a whole vocabulary describing the art of political suppression, and its insights into the use of ideology, propaganda and technology as a means of collectively suppressing human will, remain relevant to this day.

Utopia

More, Thomas. Utopia, London : Penguin, 1965.

First published in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia is a literary classic. Set in two parts, More's tale begins with the story of a sailor who he meets in Antwerp, Raphael Hythloday, who claims to have discovered a new society while accompanying Amerigo Vespucci to the Americas. Tactfully dodging the potential political ramifications of speaking out in medieval Britain, More's protagonist favorably compares this island republic to Britain, in conversation with an influential cleric-cum-politician. Hythloday (whose name means 'speaker of nonsense' in Greek) elaborates a series of reforms that Britain ought to adopt, along the lines of his fabled island paradise, from abandoning the use of mercenary soldiers and the death-penalty for theft, to the cessation of land enclosure.

Part 2 is a direct account of the social organisation found in Utopia - from its political system and laws and customs, to the people's cultural disdain for exorbitant wealth, gambling, war and social neglect of the elderly.

Utopia defies simple analysis - is it simply a satire of the faults of 16th century Britain,  or More's attempt to depict a communistic society free from want and tyranny, and therefore worth striving for? Red herrings abound, including More's own interjections throughout the telling of the tale, and the fact that Utopia literally translates from the Greek as 'no-place'. However, it remains a must-read for anyone looking for an entree into the genre, and more broadly interested in the capacity of the human imagination to construct alternatives for existence.