Dystopian – Graham Clements

A review of Julia by Sandra Newman

Graham Clements — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 03:47:00 +0000

I can’t remember reading a more harrowing novel than Sandra Newman’s Julia. The novel really had me fearing for the two main characters and where our society might be heading. Julia is the story of Winston Smith’s lover from the novel 1984. I read 1984 decades ago, so I am not sure how much the story in Julia diverges from Orwell’s novel, but Julia seems to be set in a much more desolate world than what I remember of Orwell’s 1984.

Julia is much more than the story of her relationship with Winston Smith. We meet Julia as a child of well-off parents, but then the parents get on the wrong side of Big Brother, and they are banished to a special area zone. A zone full of proles and labour camps. But with the help of her mother, Julia manages to get a job in the Ministry of Truth. She is a mechanic whose main task is to keep the machines running in the Fiction Department. A department that, among other things, rewrites novels and poems to make them suit the Big Brother ethos. It is there that she meets Winston Smith.

Julia lives in a rundown dorm with other unmarried women. It is very basic, just a bunk bed with a cupboard and surrounded by telescreens to keep an eye on the women. The dorm has no showers, and the toilets keep getting clogged. It is in a state of decay like the rest of London, except for the Party areas. Apart from the failure to fix and clean the infrastructure due to resources being spent on the ongoing war, many areas of London have been bombed and continue to be bombed.

Julia is a product of her environment. She keeps to herself, hardly trusting anyone. She hides her occasional sexual activity, as unmarried sex is illegal. Like many, she pays lip service to the plethora of Big Brother rules. She is definitely guilty of Wrong Think as she pretends to display hate during the daily hate broadcasts. She puts on a total front to the world. She is a strong woman whose sole aim is survival, but she is also a victim of the society she lives in. She has no intention of rebelling against Big Brother.

On the other hand, Winston Smith is full of secret bravo about taking on Big Brother. He seeks the truth and a way to fight to achieve it. When they first meet, Julia thinks he is somewhat naïve. She eventually sees him as totally deluded by thoughts of a successful rebellion.

The novel’s ending looked like it was going to surprise the reader with hope for Julia, but that hope is squashed under yet another boot.

As I read the novel, I found myself becoming paranoid about who might be watching me and how much of a performance everyone was giving to me. That is the sort of effect this novel can have. It is an excellent read and rams home the warning that we should be wary of ceding our freedom to bright and shiny false hopes like Trump and Putin.

I think Julia will be considered a classic in the not-too-distant future. Either that or it might be rewritten to suit the authoritarian government of the day. I would also not be surprised if a Big Brother of the future recommends schoolchildren read Julia so they will fear the consequences of Wrong Think.

Review of Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

Graham Clements — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 22:30:00 +0000

Saha is a dystopian novel set on a fictitious Korean island called Town. The island is completely corporatised. Everything is run by a company, from education to health to the government. To survive in Town, you have to be a good corporate citizen. It is the sort of utopia someone like Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart would idolise.

The story is set around an abandoned housing tower complex, Saha, which is now inhabited by dispossessed squatters. They have set up their own power source, a well for water, and a vegetable garden. The authorities tolerate them as they can be used for menial labour. But they have no access to any services, like medical, social security, or educational services. Charities don’t exist. The squatters are classified as non-citizens who are left to fend for themselves.

In an episodic fashion, the novel tells the story of the inhabitants of Saha. It begins with Do-Kyung waking and vomiting and then finding Su dead in a car. We are not told what has happened as he flees. But the novel is not a mystery. It is an examination of the lives of people who have been abandoned by a totally corporatised society. A society, from what I have read, that South Korea is not far from in reality.

Some of the characters have deformities, like the one-eyed Sara. Some are fleeing persecution. One is used for medical experimentation. Many of them have secrets. All of them hope for a better life. All of them hope to one day become citizens of Town.

Saha is a novel that questions how the less fortunate are treated in society and where neoliberalism is taking us. This could be the Western world of the near future. It is probably close to the China of the present. It is a brutal novel that could devastate a reader who is yet to realise how harmful and uncaring capitalism is.

I found the writing good, but a bit stilted to begin with. I think the style of writing emphasises the uncaring nature of the society and how the novel’s characters are unable to participate in it.

I enjoyed the novel and will look up more of Cho Nam-Joo’s writing. I cared about the characters and what happened to them. I recommend this book to readers with a social conscience.

[Spoiler alert] The ending is ambiguous. I took it to mean that the characters find no one to attack or blame for their plight, just a faceless corporation.

Review of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

Graham Clements — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 06:08:00 +0000

Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course where we studied the text in-depth, so it was relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series. People who watch it may make different connections to The Testaments than I did and react differently.

The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a baby. One of the four head Aunts complicit in imposing the strict regime of oppression on the women of Gilead is the second storyteller. The final narrator is a teenager who grew up in Gilead and joined the Aunts to flee an attempted arranged marriage.

The story has a plot which the author does not fully explain. Atwood leaves it up to the reader to work out why some things happen rather than have one of the characters tell the reader why she is doing something. For example, I wondered why the Aunt chose a particular courier to smuggle documents out of Gilead. A reader looking for plot holes might think they had found one, as it took me a while to figure out why that particular courier was chosen.

The novel switches back and forth between points of view, but unlike many books that use this technique, I wasn’t troubled by the frequent change of viewpoint as I was keen to learn more about that person’s story. This indicates that all the storylines were equally important and not dominated by one main storyline with interrupting subplots.

I found the novel a real page-turner. I read its 400 pages in five sittings, which is quick for me. I particularly enjoyed discovering more about how Gilead came into being and the origins and motivations of the original Aunts.

The Testaments’ words flow off the page. Atwood is very much a writer who writes for readers. She would rather impress with her ideas, themes and story than with her clever word usage. I have read four of her other novels, including the excellent Maddaddam trilogy, so she is one of my favourite authors.

The Testaments has a much more definite ending than the somewhat ambiguous finish of The Handmaid’s Tale. Overall, I think The Testaments is an excellent end to the world of Gilead, but it is not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, which created Gilead and the belief system imposed on the people there. I think The Handmaid’s Tale would have been a more worthy winner of the Booker Prize. But The Testaments is still a great novel by a great speculative fiction writer.

Quick review of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Graham Clements — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 02:14:00 +0000

The Windup Girl is one of the most imaginative dystopian science fiction novels I have read. It has fantastic world-building and is peopled with flawed characters who primarily look out for themselves. The novel is set in a future Thailand in a near-apocalyptic world, where the Thais try to cope with climate change, rising sea levels, running out of fossil fuels, and famines caused by diseases attacking genetically engineered crops.

Thailand is a holdout from food conglomerates who want to introduce genetically engineered crops into the kingdom and get access to the Thai seed bank that the Thais have used to create disease-resistant crops. Added to this mix are windup people or clones, servants created with jerky movements, hence the label windup.

The plot has four main strings: a battle between the trade ministry, who want to open Thailand to overseas food conglomerates, and the environmental ministry, who don’t. The second plot revolves around a conglomerate agent’s attempts to access the seed bank. A third plot is the plight of a windup girl who has been abandoned to degrading work in a brothel and her attempts to escape her predicament. The final plot is that of a Chinese Malay who escaped slaughter in his own country and is attempting, through dubious means, to survive as a despised foreigner in Thailand. All the stories intertwine, and the novel comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Quick review of When the Floods Came.

Graham Clements — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 02:11:00 +0000

When the Floods Came is a well-written and imaginative take on an apocalyptic future. The novel is set in England, where a virus has wiped out most of the population. A few people live in isolated pockets using technology that is slowly running down. The main focus is a family who live by themselves in an otherwise abandoned apartment block. The story is told from the viewpoint of 22-year-old Roza. Due to the effects of the virus, people her age and under are rare.

The story centres around Roza waiting for her fiance (whom she has never met in real life; all their interactions have been on the web) to arrive on his push bike – no cars or pods are still running. While she waits, a mysterious stranger turns up. His arrival brings a sense of mystery and intrigue. Does he want to help and fit in, or does he have some hidden agenda?

The story is more character than plot-based. It is about how a family cut off from physical interaction with other survivors copes with a stranger and the outside world he introduces them to.

Review of Brother in the Land

Graham Clements — Fri, 22 May 2015 08:23:00 +0000

Brother in The Land begins with teenager Danny taking a break from working in his father’s corner store for a long bike ride into the English countryside. It starts to rain, so he takes shelter in a World War II pillbox. As he waits for the rain to stop, he sees the flashes of nuclear missiles exploding.

Aware that the rain might contain radiation, he waits for it to stop and then rides back to his fictional hometown of Skipley. It is badly damaged, and hundreds are dead. The rest of the novel tells the story of Danny’s attempt to survive.

Brother in the Land is a young adult novel told exclusively from Danny’s point of view. Danny seems slightly emotionally detached from what is going on around him. He mourns little for family and friends who died, which leaves the reader wondering if he had had any friends. But perhaps he is just in shock and too busy getting on with surviving to mourn.

The novel does a realistic job of describing the aftermath of a nuclear attack: the breakdown in authority, the wait for help while people do whatever it takes to survive, people dying of radiation sickness, crops failing, and deformed babies being born.

The novel was written and set in the 1980s, when nuclear war was a big fear. But it reads like it could have been written in the 1950s. One reason for this is the near-total absence of females in leadership roles. The novel has only one substantial female character, the tough but pretty Kim. She is used to show that Danny still has teenage hormones.

The novel has a real boy’s own adventure feel. Obviously, its author, Robert Swindells, had a military background, with Danny’s devotion to duty being one of the novel’s big themes. Duties included helping his family and joining a militia to fight those who sought to enslave the survivors.

The prose is straightforward, with little creative flair. The sentences are short, and there is a lot of foreshadowing. Brother in the Land won the “Other” award, but I could find no reference to that award on the web.

Originally, the novel ended with little hope for Danny’s survival, but Swindells added a new chapter that gives some hope. This seems unnecessary and goes against the novel’s overall bleakness. It also seems unrealistic.

Except for the additional chapter, Brother in the Land appears to be a relatively realistic portrayal of a teenager trying to survive after a nuclear war. As it progresses, it becomes a passable action novel, with Danny forced to fight to survive. But his lack of emotion left me thinking the author was too scared to explore the inner thoughts of his main character. It is a novel for teenage boys who don’t want to read any girly emotions.