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    United States Avalon Member Vangelo's Avatar
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    Default Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?
    BY TYLER DURDEN - Zero Hedge
    SATURDAY, DEC 18, 2021 - 09:05 PM

    There’s a debate going on among the disaffected/terrified over which dystopian novel we’re now living in.

    As John Rubino remarks, some point to social media addiction and designer drugs to suggest Brave New World.

    Others see mass surveillance and pandemic lockdowns as putting us squarely in 1984.

    Still others cite online censorship and cancel culture as favoring Fahrenheit 451.

    Each of these opinions seems valid, which is confusing.

    A prisoner should know the shape of their cell. So it’s a relief to find out that someone (not sure who) has settled the argument by creating the following Venn diagram (Tweeted by our friend David Morgan).



    <<Moderators: Please move to a more appropriate thread as necessary.>>
    Last edited by Vangelo; 19th December 2021 at 03:42.
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    let's say at individual level many are living in dire/grim reality (fear forced down the throat - authoritarian regimes) heading to elements of one or another dystopian scenario for sure.
    looking at the big picture, is easier to spot elements of all scenarios happening more in certain regions of the world than other.
    It is the same patterns in many countries just different timing, executing the script.
    --
    A chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    i would fit in "invasion of the body snatchers" into that great diagram

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Airplane Two with Leslie Neilson. Or Bevis and Butthead. Or maybe Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

    For the younger crowd: Spongbob Squarepants.

    Or any other Looney Tunes type, totally retarded and just for a laugh, or perhaps tragic, comedy.
    Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water...Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee

    Free will can only be as free as the mind that conceives it.

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    Exclamation Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    • Computing Forever Reviews: Equilibrium


    Even when it was released close to 20 years ago, critics felt Equilibrium was derivative of dystopian staples like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451. "1984 for Dummies," begins a TV Guide review. And through contemporary eyes, Equilibrium looks indistinguishable from franchises like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and, yes, The Matrix.
    Quote The film follows John Preston (Bale), an enforcement officer in a future in which feelings and artistic expression are outlawed and citizens take daily injections of psychoactive drugs to suppress their emotions. After accidentally missing a dose, Preston begins to experience emotions, which makes him question his morality and moderate his actions while attempting to remain undetected by the suspicious society in which he lives. Ultimately, he aids a resistance movement using advanced martial arts, which he was taught by the regime he is helping to overthrow.

    Libria, a totalitarian city-state established by survivors of World War III, blames human emotion as the cause for the war. Any activity or object that stimulates emotion is strictly forbidden. Those in violation are labelled "Sense Offenders" and sentenced to death. The population is forced to take a daily injection of "Prozium II" to suppress emotion. Libria is governed by the Tetragrammaton Council, led by "Father", who communicates propaganda through giant video screens throughout the city. At the pinnacle of law enforcement are the Grammaton Clerics, trained in the martial art of gun kata. Clerics frequently raid homes to search for and destroy illegal materials – art, literature and music – executing violators on the spot. A resistance movement, known as the "Underground", emerges to topple Father and the Tetragrammaton Council.
    2021 today: If mandatory vaccines becomes more and more totally "normalized" ... What is the next step? ... mass mandatory forced (chemical) "medications" for all people who resist? ... To protect & safeguard the "Great Dystopian Reset"? ... With random tests everywhere to see if you are medicated enough? ... Seems "farfetched" but so does everything else during COVID1984 last 2 years.
    cheers,
    John
    Last edited by ExomatrixTV; 20th December 2021 at 09:08.
    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Arther C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End?

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    At this present time 'Hard Times' - swiftly moving into next week with 'A Christmas Carol' then proceeding the new year with 'Great Expectations' ...

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Quote Posted by mizo (here)
    At this present time 'Hard Times' - swiftly moving into next week with 'A Christmas Carol' then proceeding the new year with 'Great Expectations' ...
    Apart from Bladerunner et al, there should be a Dickensian modification to ‘Great Expectorations’ with all these mad variants of the flu flitting about!!
    Can state categorically that family came down with lurgi for 4 weeks, a ‘ghastly cold’, where vile sinus stuff was in proliferation, beyond belief!!!
    The love you withhold is the pain that you carry
    and er..
    "Chariots of the Globs" (apols to Fat Freddy's Cat)

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    I know what you mean about the vile sinus stuff...no need to go into detail, yes?
    Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water...Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee

    Free will can only be as free as the mind that conceives it.

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Quote Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
    I know what you mean about the vile sinus stuff...no need to go into detail, yes?
    Honestly Ernie, this was a shock to my family who are used to sinus fiascos, so I would recommend nasal douches of salt water if you can’t get Sterimar in uk, or colloidal silver solution spraying, washing, swallowing. Wouldn’t want anyone to suffer.

    Sorry to digress, and Minority Report….
    The love you withhold is the pain that you carry
    and er..
    "Chariots of the Globs" (apols to Fat Freddy's Cat)

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    I'm not much into movies but it does feel like Lord of the Rings, with evil creeping insidiously over the earth. Where are Gandalf and the gang when you need them?

    Around the time when the trilogy was released (so almost 20 years ago), I saw three trailers at the cinema and every single one was a 'saviour' film, with one lone oddball saving the world. It occurred to me at the time that people were being primed with Frodo, Harry Potter et al saving the world; when the SHTF there's no need to protest or take action, as someone else with superpowers will save us all.

    In retrospect, it looks like pre-programming to me.

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Harrow” by Joy Williams (2021)


    I recently read this brilliant, intriguing work (library copy). I looked up reviews and I copied this into my notes file that I think is an excellent assessment of “Harrow”: (this long post review might be most interesting to folks who read “Harrow” — though it’s an interesting essay as is imo —- )


    Already Dead
    Joy Williams’s cosmic apocalypse
    JUSTIN TAYLOR
    HARROW: A NOVEL BY JOY WILLIAMS. NEW YORK: KNOPF. 224 PAGES. $26.
    The cover of Harrow: A novel
    I DROVE ACROSS the Everglades in May. I had originally planned to take Alligator Alley, but someone tipped me off that, in the twenty years since I left South Florida, the historically wild and lonesome stretch of road had been fully incorporated into I-75, turned into a standard highway corridor with tall concrete walls on both sides, designed to keep the traffic noise in and the alligators out. So on the drive west from Boynton Beach, I took the northern route, skirting along the bottom of Lake Okeechobee (which you can’t see from the road) through new subdivisions and past a succession of sugar I plantations, the horizon pillared with smoke from the farmers burning cane. Small towns where the only signs of life are dollar stores. Roadside billboards sponsored by the US Sugar Corporation insist that “the air out here is cleaner than congested urban areas.”

    On the drive back east a few days later, I took a more southerly route, hoping it would suck less, which it did. This part of the Everglades contains the Big Cypress Reservation, which I’d last visited my senior year of high school, to ring in the new millennium at a Phish show. Here I saw lots of birds and trees, and there were dozens of alligators lounging in a drainage canal between the road and the welcome-center gift shop. There were trading posts and air-boat-tour launches, plus swaths of undeveloped land. No dystopian agribusiness signage. I was able to suspend disbelief and feel like I was in “the wild” for perhaps an hour. It was fun.

    When I got home to Portland, Oregon—where that winter we had weathered a highly improbable ice storm that shut the city down for nearly a week, but were not yet familiar with the phrase “heat dome,” which would shut us down for another week come June—I picked up my copy of Joy Williams’s 2001 nonfiction collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. I was thinking of her essay “Neverglades,” in which she argues: “[The idea] that the Everglades still exists is a collective illusion shared by both those who care and those who don’t. People used to say that nothing like the Everglades existed anywhere else in the world, but it doesn’t exist in South Florida anymore either. The Park, which millions of people visit and perceive to be the Everglades, makes up only 20 percent of the historic Glades . . . vanished beneath cities, canals, vast water impoundment areas, sugarcane fields, and tomato farms.”

    Williams recounts the dismal history of the draining and poisoning of the Everglades, as well as the belated, superficial, and unsuccessful efforts to sentimentalize and “save” it, which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, a period which happens to coincide exactly with my own childhood in Miami, which may be why I remember the Everglades as having been a viable wilderness during my own lifetime even though this clearly isn’t true. Williams writes that in those waning decades of the twentieth century, “the Everglades, no longer quite existing but still troublingly existent, was increasingly being deemed worthy of love, of being saved.” On its face, this sentence is a recapitulation of the “collective illusion” concept with which the essay opens: that what we call the Everglades are in fact a giant, immersive trompe l’oeil. The powers that be want us to focus our effort on “saving” the Everglades because if we ever admitted to ourselves that it was dead we would probably start asking questions about who murdered it.

    That something can be existent without properly existing, caught halfway between being and nonbeing, or between life and death, is a concept much larger than Williams’s straightforward claims about the eradication of the Everglades. The notion of a foundational in-between-ness, of existence itself as a fleeting or fugacious form, has been central to her work from the very beginning. The writer Vincent Scarpa, who has studied and taught Williams’s work extensively, put it to me this way: “That liminal state between being alive and being dead—that’s Joy’s playground.” He reminded me that nursing homes, “these collectives where it goes unacknowledged or otherwise refused that the living are only playing at living,” feature frequently in her work. “But we’re really all in that liminal state, just to varying degrees.” Sure enough, a nursing home is a central setting of Williams’s novel The Quick and the Dead (2000), which also features a petulant ghost. Expand the category a bit and you’ll find hospitals and hotels along with rest homes. Her 1988 novel, Breaking and Entering, is about a pair of drifters who squat Florida vacation homes. Florida itself is sometimes known as “God’s Waiting Room.”

    The Quick and the Dead, which is not set in Florida but in the West, is one of the weirdest, funniest, darkest novels you’ll ever read. It lost the 2001 Pulitzer Prize to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, thus fulfilling the promise of Luke 4:24. Williams’s new novel, Harrow, is Quick’s spiritual successor, perhaps even sequel, taking up that novel’s concerns and amplifying them by the full twenty years it took her to write it. Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle. It’s not bullish on green tech jobs or sustainable meat. It would leave Steven “Things Are Getting Better” Pinker and Matthew “One Billion Americans” Yglesias writhing in shame if guys like them were capable of reading novels or feeling shame. Harrow is a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell.

    In “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka’s great parable of displacement and delay, the title character is deprived the dignity and clarity of a fully consummated death. After living his life in the Black Forest, thriving as a hunter and eventually dying on a hunt, his “death ship lost its way,” rendering him unable to complete his journey to the afterworld. Instead, Gracchus must sail the seas, making ports of call wherever he can, lying on his bier in his winding shroud (into which he slips “like a girl into her marriage dress”), at once dead and alive, which is to say neither dead nor alive. “I am here,” says Gracchus; “more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.”

    “The Hunter Gracchus” figures prominently in Harrow, where it is evoked many times by implication before being explicitly cited and, in the novel’s final section, given a thorough and somewhat contrarian exegesis. (If you’ve read “The Killing Game,” an essay in Ill Nature, you know what Williams thinks of hunters; if you haven’t, I’ll give you one guess.) Like Gracchus or the Everglades, the world of Harrow is neither precisely dead nor alive. It is set during what I will call the periapocalypse, the endless midst of a disaster that has no proper beginning or conclusion. Some great climate calamity has ravaged the environment and provoked a mass die-off of plants and animals. Everything is polluted, debased, used up. The world is, for all intents and purposes, over. And yet it persists: there are cities and governments; cars have gas in their tanks and buildings have electricity. The world doesn’t know it’s dead, only that it’s ****tier and scarier and more desperate than it has ever been before. It is a place where “your empathies are obsolete. The battle’s over, the world’s been overcome. Almost everything that’s not us or hasn’t been fashioned by us is gone.”

    Sound familiar? Though the novel is hardly strictly realist in its style or its vision, to understand it as in any sense “speculative” or “science fictional” is to fundamentally misunderstand Williams’s project, as well as the science of climate change. At the moment I’m writing this, one of the largest wildfires in the country is burning about three hundred miles southeast of me. The skies in Portland are clear blue and all my windows are open, but I’ve got friends in Manhattan who are wearing N95 masks because the smoke from this fire has been irritating their lungs. Luckily, they’ve already got N95 masks handy because this is month one hundred (or whatever) of a global pandemic caused by a virus that may or may not have been grown in a Chinese laboratory with US government money and then unleashed on the world by virtue of sheer human stupidity. I read a really interesting article the other day about the drying up of the Great Salt Lake and how the biggest problem won’t be the catastrophic habitat loss or the brutal blow to regional tourism (though these will, for the record, be enormous problems) but rather that the exposure of the lake bed, which contains huge reserves of arsenic (a “toxic dustbin” per CNN dot com), will turn the wind carcinogenic as it sweeps across the parched West. Keep those masks handy! Where was I?

    Oh yeah, Harrow. The protagonist and sometimes narrator is a teenager named Khristen, whose mother believes that she briefly died shortly after she was born, and ought to have gleaned some crucial intel or special powers from her stint in the great beyond. But nobody else, including Khristen, believes Khristen died. Book One of the novel concerns Khristen’s childhood. After her father dies, her mother sends her to a boarding school run out of an old sanatorium somewhere in the Western wilds, where the students recite Nietzsche at the induction ceremony and eat a lot of eggs. (It sounds a bit like Deep Springs minus the ranching.) After the school shuts down, seemingly in response to some periapocalyptic acceleration that goes largely unglimpsed, Khristen takes a train to a hotel where her mother may or may not have attended an environmental conference at some point in the recent (or not so recent) past. But it’s hard to know because, as a woman named Lola tells her, “Time doesn’t have the tolerance with us that it used to. For all the good it did, that conference could have taken place before you were born.”

    BOOK TWO OF THE NOVEL BREAKS OUT of Khristen’s perspective and into an omniscient third person. It takes place on the grounds of the aforementioned hotel and a motel that sits beside it. Both structures are on the shore of a toxic lake that everyone calls Big Girl, and to which they tend to attribute some sentience, if not precisely consciousness. Lola, as it happens, is the proprietress of both motel and hotel; the former being for passers-through, such as Khristen. The hotel, aka the Institute, serves a different function, though its denizens are also, in a sense, passing through. “The Institute was not a suicide academy or a terrorist hospice. Or not exactly.” The Institute is populated by militant geriatrics with terminal illnesses who hope to die for a cause that will redeem them for having wasted their lives. This “army of the aged and ill” believes that almost everything we might understand as civic and industrial “recovery” are in fact reversions to the destructive and evil behaviors that precipitated disaster. As one member of the Institute succinctly puts it, “We will bring about the collapse of the collapse recovery.”

    They have a special hatred for animal torture conducted under the aegis of scientific research or industrial agriculture. The drug Premarin, for instance, is synthesized from pregnant horses, whose unwanted foals are slaughtered by the thousands. Behavioral scientists wonder whether they can induce psychopathology in monkeys through programmatic rape and violence. Any given Big Mac might contain the flesh of 100 different cows in its measly 3.2 ounces of beef. None of this, needless to say, is invention on Williams’s part. It’s all as real as the arsenic in the lake bed, the phthalates building up in your bloodstream, the little itch in your lungs from the smoke from the fires that are burning as I write this and that may well still be burning when this issue goes to press and perhaps even when you receive it in your mailbox or, more likely, read it on your phone.

    Sorry, got sidetracked again. I was telling you about the Institute.

    These oldsters, if not exactly a force majeure, were a baffling and bitter anomaly, characterized and dismissed as senile mavericks, lone termites, or perfect examples of why the aged mind was not in the interests of society. They did not consider themselves “terrorists.” That word had suffered considerable manipulation and marginalization and could now only be counted on to describe the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.

    Some members of the Institute feel conflicted about their calling. Do their attacks really serve the interest of justice, or even retribution? Do they provide moral instruction to the public? Don’t they mostly take out underlings who, while obviously culpable, are nevertheless cogs in a machine they didn’t build and don’t control, victims of their own constrained circumstances? Moreover, dying sucks and nobody wants to do it, not even the elderly and terminally ill. Lola complains at one point that as the pace of assassinations has dropped off, the Institute has become more like a hospice proper. Many of its targets are now themselves dying of old age.

    Khristen takes an equivocal view of their project. “They were flawed and their efforts futile, but living among them when the apocalypse had come and gone, scrubbing the world of grief and love, was what I had been given to know. They had hoped to awaken others, but perhaps we are not meant to awake. Perhaps it is only death’s long instant that arouses us from sleep.” But she lives at the motel, not the hotel, and spends much of her time with Barbara, a drunk, and her son, Jeffrey, a ten-year-old boy who may actually be the sort of divine child that Khristen’s mother once thought she was. Jeffrey is teaching himself the history of the law in hopes of becoming a judge. In his mind, the law is less a career than an existential or spiritual condition, just as it was for Kafka, especially in his later works where (as Philip Rahv, among others, has argued) the figure of the all-powerful and dreadful father is transfigured beyond human shape into a sort of radiantly faceless institutional authority, instantiating us in ourselves through its very refusal to know us or show us mercy.

    If all this sounds convoluted and paradoxical, it should, but I warrant it is no less convoluted than the story of a child doomed to save the world through his suffering, a sacrificial lamb whose blood washes clean even as its wrath lays waste, and who is also the general of a galactic war party riding into battle with a sword coming out of his mouth (Revelations 1:16). Etc., etc. “The Bible is constantly making use of image beyond words,” Williams told the Paris Review in 2014. “A parable provides the imagery by means of words. The meaning, however, does not lie in the words but in the imagery. What is conjured, as it were, transcends words completely in another language. This is how Kafka wrote, why we are so fascinated by him, why he speaks so universally.”

    In a masterful set piece early in Book Two, Jeffrey has a birthday party at a bowling alley near the Institute. Barbara and Lola get smashed on martinis by the pitcher while Jeffrey shows off his knowledge of English common law to Khristen and the local bowling league grows furious that the party occupies a coveted lane but refuses to bowl. Barbara has been trying to figure out how to tell Jeffrey that his father is in prison for murdering his grandfather and has decided to share this information via the illustration on his birthday cake. But the baker, having gotten the story backwards, depicts the grandfather murdering the father—specifically, the baker has reproduced Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son in buttercream frosting.

    This entire episode is—to use a technical literary term—****ing hilarious. It is also emblematic of another of the novel’s key themes, the idea of source decay or legibility loss. Gordon, one of the rare oldsters who has not only carried out his kamikaze mission but survived it, at one point considers “the amount of ink that can fade from a written message without changing what it says. . . . But there comes a moment when the message changes or becomes unintelligible or both.”

    People are constantly misspeaking and mishearing in this novel, sometimes correcting themselves or each other and sometimes not. This notion too has its roots in Kafka, whose cosmology is at once entropic and eternal. One thinks of course of Gracchus, trapped between his worlds, but also of “A Country Doctor,” for whom “a false alarm on the night bell once answered—it cannot be made good, not ever”; of “The Kings’ Messengers,” who are forever “racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless”; as well as “The Coming of the Messiah,” a parable brief enough to offer in its entirety: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the last day of all.”

    I'M NOT SURE I would describe Book Three even if I could. Khristen leaves the Institute, some new characters are introduced; there’s a large tree with unusual properties; there’s that exegesis of Gracchus I mentioned earlier; and Jeffrey shows back up, profoundly transfigured yet still very much himself, his dream of a judgeship finally fulfilled—or rapidly fulfilled, depending how much time you believe has passed since the end of Book Two, which in turn depends on what you believe “time” and “the passage of time” each mean in the novel’s world, or in general.

    Tell you the truth, I don’t want to review Harrow anymore. I’ve read it twice and I used this assignment as an excuse to do a ton of supplemental reading and rereading, and yet my love still surpasses my understanding (Ephesians 3:19), and I think I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t want to evaluate this book. I want to place it in the center of a salt ring and light candles around it. I want to throw it like the I Ching and ruin my life trying to heed its inscrutable, dubious wisdom.

    I think of the one entry in Ill Nature that departs from that book’s primary subject. It’s an essay called “Why I Write,” which I assume Williams included because she knew she’d never write a second essay collection. Some days I believe “Why I Write” is the only quote unquote craft essay worth reading. Williams argues that “The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the humble absurdity, the disorienting truth, the exhilarating transmutability, this is the koan of writing. . . . The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

    I assume that for a lot of people this claim is risible, perhaps demonstrably false. Good for you if you know better than to credit such provocations, if you’re comfortable enough with your life and your station and the state of things to avoid being gulled by the abyssal mysteries. As for me and mine, we believe it absolutely. More than believing it, we recognize it and, more still, feel recognized by it. It is that same sense of mutual recognition I feel when reading this novel, indeed whenever I read Joy Williams, and that I am now fighting to preserve from my own attempt to subdue it to the demands of my hobgoblin intellect.

    It may be that the greatest achievement of Williams’s late work is its insistence on holding sacred space where despair can abide unharassed by hope. Harrow is a howl of grief for the life bleeding out of a world where “the fouling of the nest was all but complete, the birthright smashed.” To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self. What else do you want me to tell you? As I’ve said, it’s also funny. I really did laugh a lot. Five stars.

    Justin Taylor’s most recent book is the memoir Riding with the Ghost (Random House, 2020).
    Already Dead

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    Avalon Member leavesoftrees's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Probably an episode from Dougal Dixon's Man after man

    Quote Man After Man explores an imaginary future evolutionary path of humanity, from 200 years in the future to five million years in the future. It contains several technological, social and biological concepts, most prominently genetic engineering but also parasitism, slavery, and elective surgery. As a result of mankind's technological prowess, evolution is accelerated, producing several species with varying intraspecific relations, many of them unrecognizable as humans.[2]

    Instead of the field guide-like format of Dixon's previous books, After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988), and instead of the conventional narrative style of most science fiction works, the book is told through short stories, isolated sequences of dramatic events in the lives of select individuals of the future human species imagined by Dixon. The genetically engineered humans of the future, in total numbering about 40 species through the book, occur in several different and diverse forms, with genetically engineered forms first being slave races created to survive underwater and in space without the need of protective gear and suits, described as the "ultimate triumphs of the genetic engineer".[3][4]

    Eventually, modern humanity dies out and technology disappears. With subsequent human species having been engineered to be unintelligent and animal-like in order to repopulate the Earth's ecosystems, concepts like culture and civilization disappear and the lives of most human descendants revolve around gathering food and surviving the harsh conditions of nature.

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    United States Avalon Member earthdreamer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    I had seen the dystopia thread on Zero Hedge a day before it was cross posted here at Avalon and I had previously skimmed some comments.
    Commenters often invoked movies rather than novels (like “Idiocracy” — satire perfected!—and “Brazil” , bureaucracy’s absurdity to the extreme). Everyone sees the amalgamation of dystopian ideas threading through everything these days in crazy quilt work patterning.
    Children of Men” has been flashing in my mind for the past year as a mirror of possible current trajectory to our social order I fear. I read the novel (author P.D. James, 1992) after I’d seen the movie and I think the film (2006, story takes place in 2027) was a much more effective tale of intensity. The infertility crisis, riots, refugees, museum looting and destruction of masterpiece artworks, despair and violence, imagery of people segregated by wire fences and fascist authorities ruling ham fisted ineffectually.

    Ever since March of 2020, it has felt like a never ending nightmare of dystopia manifesting more insanely every month. The monumental global orchestration of brainwashing propaganda and gaslighting has been externally inserted into all facets of interpersonal communication.
    The manifestation of dystopia as “normal” is depressing as hell.

    And yet

    A miracle birth brings a ray of “hope” at the end of “Children of Men”, the spell of despair momentarily diverted. Anxiety and fear will not occlude every blessing.

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    United States Avalon Member Mike's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    I agree with the selections here, but I'd also sprinkle in a little Catch-22.

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    Avalon Member Pam's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Quote Posted by leavesoftrees (here)
    Probably an episode from Dougal Dixon's Man after man

    Quote Man After Man explores an imaginary future evolutionary path of humanity, from 200 years in the future to five million years in the future. It contains several technological, social and biological concepts, most prominently genetic engineering but also parasitism, slavery, and elective surgery. As a result of mankind's technological prowess, evolution is accelerated, producing several species with varying intraspecific relations, many of them unrecognizable as humans.[2]

    Instead of the field guide-like format of Dixon's previous books, After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988), and instead of the conventional narrative style of most science fiction works, the book is told through short stories, isolated sequences of dramatic events in the lives of select individuals of the future human species imagined by Dixon. The genetically engineered humans of the future, in total numbering about 40 species through the book, occur in several different and diverse forms, with genetically engineered forms first being slave races created to survive underwater and in space without the need of protective gear and suits, described as the "ultimate triumphs of the genetic engineer".[3][4]

    Eventually, modern humanity dies out and technology disappears. With subsequent human species having been engineered to be unintelligent and animal-like in order to repopulate the Earth's ecosystems, concepts like culture and civilization disappear and the lives of most human descendants revolve around gathering food and surviving the harsh conditions of nature.
    Sounds very interesting. I thought I would see about buying the book. Unfortunately it is out of print and selling for almost 300.00. Too bad, sounds very interesting.

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    Avalon Member Pam's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Something finally occurred to me about the brilliant novel, 1984 which of course has huge similarities to today after reading it multiple times. The harm of government control seemed to be almost exclusively on those that were members and participating and brainwashed by the government.Those that were puppets of the regime. Those that blindly believe in anything they are told no matter how irrational or obvious the lie and never question anything.

    The insignificant people that were not part of the whole thing and seemed to be considered worthless, the proles considered ignorant did not suffer the restrictions and mind control to any level close to those that had chosen to be in the party.

    I watched the movie Idiocracy again. It really is a brilliant comedy. The last time I watched it, I had a uncomfortable feeling as in many ways we are living at the same level of unthinking, non reasoning and mindless amorality as the culture presented. It doesn't look quite the same thing as we are experiencing yet but it certainly shares an uncomfortable amount of similarities. I know you are talking novels here but I couldn't resist the movie thing.

    Another movie that blows my mind that projects a society that I believe the elite envision for the few that get to live in their New World Order is the movie "Equals". The story line is basically that after a catastrophic war it was decided that emotion was the cause of wars. Fetuses were somehow manipulated genetically to not have emotions. Each person lived alone in a small living unit. They procreated through artificial insemination.They did not own anything, they did not socialize. They associated with others only through work.

    Those maintaining and enforcing the social structure were responsible for "health" and "safety".

    The only problem one really needed to worry about was getting SOS or switched on syndrome. This caused individuals to begin having emotions again, progressively. At first one could be medicated to stifle emotions but eventually they would be removed from the society as the "disease" progressed. Essentially you would be encouraged to commit suicide while being locked up and isolated at a facility, in actuality, quarantined. The society was very tightly controlled but it didn't look bad on the surface and as long as you were 100% compliant and had no emotions you were left alone. Anyway, I can't help but think this is a perfect vision of the Schwab society they have planned for the "lucky" few that get to be a part of it.
    Last edited by Pam; 21st December 2021 at 11:32.

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    From the novel How to survive Everything by Ewan Morrison

    List of Last Things

    Go and walk this city you think you know. Start to compile the list as you pass things by.
    Go to spaces of transit where people rarely walk. Find a forgotten pedestrian overpass, stand alone and watch the six lanes of cars rushing like a river. Rush hour is just beginning and the sun has not fully risen. The cars have their headlights on. Maybe you listen to music on your Iphone when you do this. It might help you cry.

    Look down at the cars, white lights oncoming, red receding, and tell yourself that there will be no more cars. Listen to the music and say there will be no more MP3s, no more singles or albums or recording artists or record companies. Take the headphones out and tell yourself there will be no more streetlights and traffic lights when the pandemic comes. There will be no more petrol, no more radio stations, no more news bulletins.

    You will feel a terrible rage in your chest, against those in power who let this get to the point where the pandemic is inevitable. The immensity of the collective delusion they have created. The billions they have lied to.

    Everyone who passes beneath your feet is going to die, the slow death of infection, the slow death of starvation, and the brutal death that comes to the survivors. The blood on their hands.
    Picture the thousands of cars abandoned and burned beneath your feet as you stand on the overpass. Cry or shout at the cars. No one listens. Learn from this.

    You have to get beyond anger, because impotent rage without outlet will kill you. It is already killing hundreds of thousands of people who also know what you know. They know the truth but it rots inside of them because they believe they are powerless to do anything. The world won’t listen.
    The truth-tellers are placed in lunatic asylums, medicated, fired, divorced, imprisoned. So they kill the truth they pretend they don’t know, they drink and take drugs and seek a way out through sex, they bury themselves in distractions, walking amnesiacs, the pre-dead, they choose the slow suicide that the world has pre-packed for them.

    Keep walking. See the advertisements for alcohol on the roadsides and in the housing estates, see the adverts for sexualised products and sensory distractions everywhere. You may find yourself weeping in the car park of a shopping center. Cry at the site of families stuffing branded boxes into their cars, and their children, faces smeared with ketchup, with ice cream, screaming for more. Their whole lives are mapped out like products with planned obsolescence built in.
    Tell yourself there will be no more toys. No more ice cream. No more credit cards or credit, when the pandemic hits.
    You pass advertising hoardings with the faces of smiling people, the exposed bodies
    of women. Tell yourself, there will be no more adverts for holidays, for insurance, no more desire for things of status. Stand back and watch the thousands drive out of the retail parks and join a traffic jam, and see them as rows of caged animals in a vast bio lab experiment. That is what they soon will be.
    Your anger may shift. Perhaps you will feel a hollowness developing as you empty yourself of
    illusions. You may be overwhelmed with compassion or pity. These are useless feelings. Add These emotions to your list of last things. Pity will leave you and the ones you love defenseless.

    Walk forgotten sidings and glimpse the future without humans, the weeds reclaiming the concrete
    architecture. Walk to the train station. Watch the young people, so attractive, so vital and hopeful. Tell yourself, there will be no more power lines, no more timetables. No more time to catch or kill.Look at them. Sixty in the carriage, all on their smart phones, texting,playing games, making no eye contact with each other. Picture the spread of the virus in the air between them. And tell yourself there will be no more dating apps, no more games, no more upgrades. No more memory.

    Remind yourself there are four vast conglomerates who control all news media and technology. Two of whom also fund bio-warfare laboratories.

    You want to scream out what you know. Scream save yourselves! But it is futile. No one will listen. Today you must give up on everyone.

    Walk through the city center to the shopping precinct. Consider a world without electricity. What is
    the carbon imprint of six billion dead and decomposing bodies? Add ecology to your list of last things that no longer matter. Tell yourself there will be no more recycling, no more charity.
    Ask yourself why you should even try to save these people who laugh at you. They would only be
    competitors for the last remaining resources.
    If they survive, they will take food from your children.

    No democratic processes, no media revelation will change what is to come. Give up hope of that.
    Learn to live with your knowledge as a secret. The last thing you need is for others to know, Let the power of the secret locked inside you fuel you, like a contained explosion in a nuclear reactor.

    Walk through a mall and take the elevator to the car park, go to the top floor and stand looking out at the hundreds of people far below, as a virus in a petri dish. Tell yourself it is too late for them- let them die in your mind. Then look out to the skyline. You must face death now.
    Kill yourself and anxiety will end.
    Or walk away and start your life again from zero.

    Turn your despair into action, but know that these millions will be against you. Everyone will think
    you insane. Feel the wind, hear the distant sounds of shoppers. See how easy it would be to jump. Feel that hollow expand within you. Look down and tell yourself your list of last things. There will be no more stores, no more fashions, no more buskers playing pop songs in the streets, no more traffic wardens, no more
    credit cards no more special offers, no more debt.
    Jump or don’t jump.
    Last edited by Frankie Pancakes; 16th December 2022 at 21:06.

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    United States Avalon Member DNA's Avatar
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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    V for Vendetta

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    Default Re: Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?

    Quote Posted by thepainterdoug (here)
    i would fit in "invasion of the body snatchers" into that great diagram
    That cosmic horror film fits the last three years, I had been thinking similar. Losing people, then key people, then the system, ...and having to flee to isolation. It's such a popular film I wonder if there's something innate in us that knows already? Douglas Adams' work could have been cosmic horror if he didn't find it all so funny. Cosmic horror implies alien or extra-dimensional. One thing seems clear to me: over the last three years the horror playing out is showing itself to be devilishly clever.

    But more directly on topic, throw in William Gibson's sprawl series

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