Ecotopia


Ernest Callenbach - 1975
    Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future. Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a “stable-state” ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he’s alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia’s earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient “mini-cities” to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, tree worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted such peaceful revolutions as the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. His old beliefs challenged, his cynicism replaced by hope, Weston meets a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman and undertakes a relationship whose intensity will lead him to a critical choice between two worlds.

Jennifer Government


Max Barry - 2002
    It's a globalised, ultra-capitalist free market paradise! Hack Nike is a lowly merchandising officer who's not very good at negotiating his salary. So when John Nike and John Nike, executives from the promised land of Marketing, offer him a contract, he signs without reading it. Unfortunately, Hack's new contract involves shooting teenagers to build up street cred for Nike's new line of $2,500 trainers. Hack goes to the police—but they assume that he's asking for a subcontracting deal and lease the assassination to the more experienced NRA. Enter Jennifer Government, a tough-talking agent with a barcode tattoo under her eye and a personal problem with John Nike (the boss of the other John Nike). And a gun. Hack is about to find out what it really means to mess with market forces.

Walden Two


B.F. Skinner - 1948
    Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct.

Woman on the Edge of Time


Marge Piercy - 1976
    One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow...

We


Yevgeny Zamyatin - 1924
    In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle


Harold BloomJerome Klinkowitz - 2002
    Doxey, Jerome Klinkowitz, Richard Giannone, John L. Simons, James Lundquist, and other scholars.- After the bomb, Dad came up with ice / Terry Southern- Vonnegut's Cat's cradle / William S. Doxey- The private person as public figure / Jerome Klinkowitz- Cat's cradle / Richard Giannone- Tangled up in you : a playful reading of Cat's cradle / John L. Simons- From formula toward experiment : Cat's cradle and God bless you, Mr. Rosewater / Jerome Klinkowitz- Playful genesis and dark revelation in Cat's cradle / Leonard Mustazza- Bokononism as a structure of ironies / Zoltan Ab di-Nagy- Mother night, Cat's cradle, and The crimes of our time / Jerome Klinkowitz- Vonnegut's invented religions as sense-making systems / Peter Freese- Icy solitude : magic and violence in Macondo and San Lorenzo / Wendy B. Faris- Vonnegut's cosmos / David H. Goldsmith- Cosmic irony / James Lundquist- Cat's cradle : Jonah and the whale / Lawrence R. Broer- Hurting 'til it laughs : the painful-comic science fiction stories of Kurt Vonnegut / Peter J. Reed- The paradox of "awareness" and language in Vonnegut's fiction / Loree Rackstraw.

Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited


Aldous Huxley - 1958
    Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.The non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as over-population, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

Timequake


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1997
    It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will - not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.

The Dispossessed


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1974
    He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life—Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

Peace


Gene Wolfe - 1975
    For Weer's imagination has the power to obliterate time and reshape reality, transcending even death itself.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion


Dexter Palmer - 2010
    His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane.The tale of Harold’s life is also one of an alternate reality, a lucid waking dream in which the well-heeled have mechanical men for servants, where the realms of fairy tales can be built from scratch, where replicas of deserted islands exist within skyscrapers.. As Harold’s childhood infatuation with Miranda changes over twenty years to love and then to obsession, the visionary inventions of her father also change Harold’s entire world, transforming it from a place of music and miracles to one of machines and noise. And as Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda’s life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine.Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.

The Iron Heel


Jack London - 1908
    A dystopian novel about the terrible oppressions of an American oligarchy at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and the struggles of a socialist revolutionary movement.

A Modern Utopia


H.G. Wells - 1905
    With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Golden Apples of the Sun


Ray Bradbury - 1953
    He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men thus revealed running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming matchbox; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!Journey with the century's most popular fantasy writer into a world of wonder and horror beyond your wildest dreams.Contents:- The Fog Horn (1951)- The Pedestrian (1951)- The April Witch (1952)- The Wilderness (1952)- The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)- Invisible Boy (1945)- The Flying Machine (1953)- The Murderer (1953)- The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind (1953)- I See You Never (1947)- Embroidery (1951)- The Big Black and White Game (1945)- A Sound of Thunder (1952)- The Great Wide World Over There (1952)- Powerhouse (1948)- En la Noche (1952)- Sun and Shadow (1953)- The Meadow (1953)- The Garbage Collector (1953)- The Great Fire (1949)- Hail and Farewell (1953)- The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Confessions of a Crap Artist


Philip K. Dick - 1975
    Dick's weirdest and most accomplished novels. Jack Isidore is a crap artist -- a collector of crackpot ideas (among other things, he believes that the earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight) and worthless objects, a man so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But seen through Jack's murderously innocent gaze, Charlie and Juddy Hume prove to be just as sealed off from reality, in thrall to obsessions that are slightly more acceptable than Jack's, but a great deal uglier.