{"id":1472,"date":"2020-03-15T16:42:17","date_gmt":"2020-03-15T23:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thezachproject.us\/?p=1472"},"modified":"2020-03-15T16:42:17","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T23:42:17","slug":"dystopias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/2020\/03\/15\/dystopias\/","title":{"rendered":"dystopias"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I went to put The Sheep Look Up<\/em> back in the bookshelf, I saw a couple of other books there that might qualify as dystopias.<\/p>\n

I need to say that I’ve been reading science fiction since I was about 12 years old. That’s more than 50 years, kids! I used to have a large collection but gave away many in my last couple of moves. In my opinion, the ones I have left are the best of the best. Certain authors are well represented: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Joe Haldeman from the 1950’s through 1970’s. Others have only one.<\/p>\n

Alas, Babylon<\/em> is the only book by Pat Frank in my collection. Actually, I can’t remember even reading anything else by him. It’s not really dystopian. It’s the story of a small community in Florida after a nuclear exchange. Just looking at the book spine today triggered a thought that that was similar to the Brunner stories.<\/p>\n

The other one that seemed similar in my mind was the Larry Niven novel about a comet hitting the earth, Lucifer’s Hammer<\/em>. That’s not really a dystopia either.<\/p>\n

John Varley’s Titan<\/em> trilogy would qualify as dystopian even though the bulk of the action takes place away from earth. In it, the madness of humans destroying their home planet drives the story.<\/p>\n

Since the basic technique of science fiction is to imagine a future world and build a story around it, it shouldn’t be surprising that most are rather dark.<\/p>\n

Younger authors that I like a lot have written about dystopias. Snow Crash<\/em> by Neal Stephenson and the early William Gibson novels, beginning with Neuromancer<\/em>, are clearly dystopian.<\/p>\n

The more I write that word, the less I like it. Maybe I’ll do a list of the SF novels in my library – not that many, less than 50 – and do a quick description\/review. Some are hopeful . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I went to put The Sheep Look Up back in the bookshelf, I saw a couple of other books there that might qualify as dystopias. I need to say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[613,167,614,616,615,166],"class_list":["post-1472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-john-brunner","tag-john-varley","tag-larry-niven","tag-neal-stephenson","tag-pat-frank","tag-william-gibson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1473,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472\/revisions\/1473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}