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526. The Sunlight Pilgrims

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Jenni Fagan

Genre:   Fiction, Dystopia

310 pages, published March 24, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in a futuristic 2020 and imagines the world in a new ice age.  Rather than head south as many others are doing, a grieving Dylan  heads north to bury his mother’s and grandmother’s ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.  At the same time on the Scottish Highlands, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by and prepare for a record-breaking winter. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park, life changes course for Estella and Constance.

Quotes 

“When grown-ups hear a little dark door creaking in their hearts they turn the telly up. They slug a glass of wine. They tell the cat it was just a door creaking. The cat knows. It jumps down from the sofa and walks out of the room. When that little dark door in a heart starts to go click-clack click-clack click-clack click-clack so loudly and violently their chest shows an actual beat – well, then they say they’ve got bad cholesterol and they try to quit using butter, they begin to go for walks.  When the tiny dark door in her heart creaks open, she will walk right through it.  She will lie down and inside her own heart like a bird in the night.”

 “…the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless.”

 

“I’m going to draw up a human-rights contract that says everyone on earth must agree we are here as caretakers of the planet, first and foremost.”

 

 “She focuses, trying to absorb the suns’ energy deep into her cells so when they descend into the darkest winter for 200 years, in the quietest minutes, when the whole world experiences a total absence of light — she will glow, and glow, and glow.”

 

“It’s all borrowed: bricks; bodies; breathing — it’s all on loan! Eighty years on the planet if you’re lucky; why do they say if you’re lucky? Eighty years and people trying to get permanent bits of stone before they go, as if permanence were a real thing. Everyone has been taken hostage.”

 

My Take

I found The Sunlight Pilgrims to be a meandering slog without much to say.  It includes a completely unecessary subplot about gender identity that distracts from the cataclysmic environmental message of the book.  Skip.

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484. Station Eleven

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:    Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

333  pages, published September 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel set in the days of civilization’s collapse after a virus kills off most of the world’s population.  Author Emily St. John Mandel examines how human beings cope when almost every aspect of the world as they knew it ceases to exist.

Quotes 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

 

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

 

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

 

“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

 

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

 

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

 

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

 

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think – this will maybe sound weird – it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

 

 “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

 

“I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

 

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

 

 “An incomplete list:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

 

“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

 

My Take

After reading and loving The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, I was intererested to see if she had written any other books.  I discovered that Station Eleven was her breakthrough novel, so added the audio version to my library queue.  While I prefer The Glass Hotel, I did enjoy Station Eleven, especially her fascinating descriptions of how life changes after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization.

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242. Fahrenheight 451

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Ray Bradbury

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

175 pages, published October 1953

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheight 451 is set in a dystopian future where books are verboten because the powers that be deem them to make people unhappy.  The main character is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books.  After a few interactions with a teenage neighbor named Clarice, Guy comes to realize that something is missing in his life.  As begins to defy society’s rules by keeping books, he becomes a hunted man.

 

Quotes 

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

 

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

 

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

 

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

 

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

 

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

 

“It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

 

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

 

My Take

I first read Fahrenheight 451 in high school.  I enjoyed it then, but think I liked it even better on the second reading more than 35 years later.  As an avid reader, it is hard for me to imagine a world without books.  They enrich my life deeply and make me think about ideas in whole new ways.  That is the point Bradbury is trying to make.  Without exposure to ideas both old and new (with books as the premier transmission form), we are destined for a life of mediocrity and banality.

 

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196. The Boy on the Bridge

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Young Adult

392 pages, published May 2, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Boy on the Bridge is the second book in the Hungry Plague series (a prequel to the first which was The Girl With All the Gifts) and takes place in a world ravaged by the highly contagious Cordyceps fungus that turns its victims into zombies (called “hungries” in the book) and is spread by biting.  The main character is fifteen year old Stephen Greaves, a scientific genius who invents a chemical blocker to hide human pheromones from the hungries’ senses.  Like Melanie in The Girl With All the Gifts, Stephen is surrounded by adults who mostly treat him with contempt, caution, or outright loathing.  Stephen is unnerved by physical contact, untrue statements, and uncertainty, and approaches challenges with a mechanical, scientific interest.  He and Samrina Khan, the only person Stephen has bonded with, are part of a ten member crew on board the heavily armed mobile laboratory Rosalind Franklin.  They are on a desperate mission to develop a cure for infected humans.

 

Quotes 

“He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.”

 

“If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen?”

 

“To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing. And at the same time it would be nothing, because you yourself would be unable, from within that damaged state, to recognise or reflect on it.”

 

“She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious.”

 

“It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.”        

 

“You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.”

 

“The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.”

 

“Things don’t end, after all. They only change, and you keep changing with them.”

 

“Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus … meaning that it keeps things moving but it’s neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.”

 

My Take

After really enjoying The Girl With All the Gifts, I was looking forward to reading its prequel, The Boy on the Bridge.  Unfortunately, M.R. Carey’s second entry in the Hungry Plague series falls well short of his first effort.  What’s missing from The Boy on the Bridge is the element of surprise from the first book where it is slowly revealed how the dystopian world operates.  The Girl With All the Gifts also featured a much more compelling relationship between the two main characters.  Interesting at times, but not enough to recommend it.

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189. The Girl with all the Gifts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Horror

460 pages, published June 19, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Girl with all the Gifts is set in a bleak future after most of humanity has succumbed to a pathogenic fungus that has turned most people into “hungries” who have an insatiable desire to eat what is left of the human race and pass along the disease.  Dr. Caldwell believes that a group of hungry children who are kept bound to their chairs at all times, especially the incredibly intelligent Melanie, hold the key to combating the deadly pandemic.  However, Melanie is much more than a test subject, especially in the view of Miss Justineau, her favorite teacher with whom she has bonded.

 

Quotes 

“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”

 

“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”

 

“This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.”

 

“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”

 

“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”

 

“the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand”

 

“may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,”

 

“And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.”

 

“It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.”

 

“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”

 

“It’s equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone’s finger.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”

 

My Take

It didn’t take long for me to be drawn into the bleak, post-Apocalyptic world created by M.R. Carey in The Girl with All the Gifts.  A big reason was the two main characters, Melanie (a young girl who is incredibly sympathetic despite who constant urge to eat human flesh) and Miss Justineau, Melanie’s teacher and protector who grapples with a world gone mad and her own past demons.  While the subject matter is a big-time downer, I was captivated by the storytelling and held in suspense until the climactic end.  If you like the dystopia genre, you should definitely check out this book.

 

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138. Ready Player One

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ernest Cline

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Young Adult, Thriller

374 pages, published August 16, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Ready Player One takes place in the year 2044.  The earth is mostly a wasteland with most residents choosing to live in the virtual reality of the OASIS.  Main character Wade Watts has devoted his life to understanding the intricacies hidden inside this alternate world’s digital borders.  When it is announced that James Halliday, the recently deceased creator of the OASIS, has left his vast fortune to the first person to solve a series of puzzles hidden in the OASIS, Wade and a group of compatriots take up the challenge and start on their quest.

 

Quotes

“The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That’s why everyone is addicted to it.”

 

“What about The Simpsons, you ask? I knew more about Springfield than I knew about my own city.”

 

“Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).”

 

“A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame. But not in the OASIS. In there, I was the great Parzival. World-famous gunter and international celebrity. People asked for my autograph. I had a fan club. Several, actually. I was recognized everywhere I went (but only when I wanted to be). I was paid to endorse products. People admired and looked up to me. I got invited to the most exclusive parties. I went to all the hippest clubs and never had to wait in line. I was a pop-culture icon, a VR rock star. And, in gunter circles, I was a legend. Nay, a god.”

 

“Students weren’t allowed to use their avatar names while they were at school. This was to prevent teachers from having to say ridiculous things like “Pimp Grease, please pay attention!” or “BigWang69, would you stand up and give us your book report?”

 

“In Marie’s opinion, the OASIS was the best thing that had ever happened to both women and people of color. From the very start, Marie had used a white male avatar to conduct all of her online business, because of the marked difference it made in how she was treated and the opportunities she was given.”

 

“From then on, my computer monitored my vital signs and kept track of exactly how many calories I burned during the course of each day. If I didn’t meet my daily exercise requirements, the system prevented me from logging into my OASIS account. This meant that I couldn’t go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life. Once the lockout was engaged, you couldn’t disable it for two months. And the software was bound to my OASIS account, so I couldn’t just buy a new computer or go rent a booth in some public OASIS café. If I wanted to log in, I had no choice but to exercise first. This proved to be the only motivation I needed. The lockout software also monitored my dietary intake. Each day I was allowed to select meals from a preset menu of healthy, low-calorie foods. The software would order the food for me online and it would be delivered to my door. Since I never left my apartment, it was easy for the program to keep track of everything I ate. If I ordered additional food on my own, it would increase the amount of exercise I had to do each day, to offset my additional calorie intake. This was some sadistic software. But it worked. The pounds began to melt off, and after a few months, I was in near-perfect health. For the first time in my life I had a flat stomach, and muscles. I also had twice the energy, and I got sick a lot less frequently. When the two months ended and I was finally given the option to disable the fitness lockout, I decided to keep it in place. Now, exercising was a part of my daily ritual.”

 

“as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness.” 

 

“Listen,” he said, adopting a confidential tone. “I need to tell you one last thing before I go. Something I didn’t figure out for myself until it was already too late.” He led me over to the window and motioned out at the landscape stretching out beyond it. “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real. Do you understand?” “Yes,” I said. “I think I do.” “Good,” he said, giving me a wink. “Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t hide in here forever.”

 

“Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.”

 

“As soon as my log-in sequence completed, a window popped up on my display, informing me that today was an election day. Now that I was eighteen, I could vote, in both the OASIS elections and the elections for U.S. government officials. I didn’t bother with the latter, because I didn’t see the point. The once-great country into which I’d been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn’t matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it. Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audio book verison of Ready Player One.  As someone who enjoys reading science fiction and dystopian novels, I appreciate the fascinating world inside the alternative virtual reality of the OASIS created by the very creative Ernest Cline, a writer who know how to keep a story humming along.  It also didn’t hurt that Ready Player One struck a nostalgia nerve with its many references to the video games and movies of my youth.   Time will tell if our future looks like the VR world of the OASIS, but it is interesting to ponder the possibility in the meantime.

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59. Red Rising

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Pierce Brown

Genre:  Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Dystopia

382 pages, published January 28, 2014

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

Summary 

The dystopian future world of Red Rising is a place where people are strictly segregated by class and color.  Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest and relegated to a life underground working in the dangerous mines of Mars.  Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.  Soon Darrow discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago and that vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet.  He and all Reds are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.  When Darrow’s wife Eo is executed, he is chosen by a group of rebels to undergo a physical transformation that will turn him into a member of the Gold ruling caste.  His body successfully altered, Darrow’s challenge is just beginning.  He is thrown into a battle among young Golds to see who will emerge as the victor.

 

Quotes

“I live for the dream that my children will be born free.  That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.’  ‘I live for you,’ I say sadly.  She kisses my cheek.  ‘Then you must live for more.”

 

“Funny how a single word can change everything in your life.”

“It is not funny at all.  Steel is power.  Money is power.  But of all the things in all the worlds, words are power.”

 

“You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is.  You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going.  I do.”

 

“The measure of a man is what he does when he has power.”

 

“The world is soundless. We cannot hear, but a pack of wolves does not need words to know that it is time to hunt.”

 

“The fleas would jump and jump to heights unknown. Then a man came along and upturned a glass jar over the fleas. The fleas jumped and hit the top of the jar and could go no farther.  Then the man removed the jar and yet the fleas did not jump higher than they had grown accustomed, because they believed there to still be a glass ceiling.”

 

“Society has three stages:  Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence.  The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.”

 

Read more

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