NYC dystopia x2

dys·to·pi·a ~noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the divided Morales family; his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast; his mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home via the subway; his father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother; and at home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. In the beginning the news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides flood the subways and knock out all satellite transmissions. Without his parents there to guide them Alex quickly moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

As things progress, Alex's attempts to keep things normal at home run counter to what's happening all around him. Yankee stadium becomes the repository for people to claim unidentified family. Alex's trip to the makeshift morgue tugs at his emotions - he'd like to know what happened to his mother, but he also doesn't want to know if she's dead. Without phone service he is unable to contact relatives in Puerto Rico to check on his father, so without proof he assumes his father is alive despite reports of the island being struck by a massive tidal wave. Alex and his sisters continue to go to school and remain as normal as possible under the circumstances, while bit by bit it becomes clear that things will never be normal again.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as stifling heat gives way to mountains of snow, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manages to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland. It's a somewhat bleak ending, but it feels genuine and hopeful at the same time.

* * * * *
Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the problems we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the people outstripped the resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who investigates a case of murder that was nothing more than a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to follow-through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noir-ish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a metropolitan city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

Cory Doctorow's graphic novel for free!

From Boing Boing:

IDW have just published the collected issues of "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now," a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers...s with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it's on a non-commercial basis. I've uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories "Craphound," "Anda's Game," "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," "After the Siege," "I, Robot" and "Nimby and the D-Hoppers."

"Anda's Game" in particular impressed the hell out of me - I couldn't believe what I was reading but some checking on the internet showed that yeah, some of the kind of flat out insanity he wrote about in that story really is true. If you want to read that story in its prose form, get a copy of the new SF anthology Starry Rift. To download the graphic novel for free, go here.

Truancy, by Isamu Fukui

Have you ever cut school? Would you if you knew that if you were caught, you’d be killed? This is the world that Tack lives in—school is truly totalitarian, and the punishment for even small transgressions (talking back to the teacher, questioning the rules) is severe. Truancy by Isamu Fukui follows Tack’s journey as he realizes that the current system is not the only way, loses someone important to him, and joins the Truancy, the resistance movement with the goal of freeing the City’s children from the wrath of the Educators.

Written when the author was 15 years old and extremely dissatisfied with the education system (he’s 17 now, and has just graduated from high school), Truancy looks at what goes wrong when one group has too much power over another in a near-future nameless City. It’s also packed with action —Tack is trained (both mentally and physically) and mentored by Umasi, a boy he meets in an abandoned sector of the City, and then soon becomes second in command to Zyid, commander of the Truants. Their missions include supply raids, assassinations, and all out battle with the Enforcers, all with the hope of bringing the Educators, the Mayor, and their oppressive system down.

Tack is not a straightforward character—he doesn’t join the Truancy because he’s bullied at school by both other students and by the teachers. His first motive for joining the Truancy is revenge—someone he loves was caught in the crossfire during one of the Truancy’s actions, and was killed. Tack vows to find the assassin who killed with seemingly no emotion, and make him pay. Once he’s involved in the organization, he starts to learn about the goals of the Truancy, and begins to sympathize with the cause. He eventually has to make choices about where his true loyalties lie.

Find out a little more about the author’s inspiration and creative process (he wrote the novel in a month over summer break) in this NPR interview, and visit Truancy’s official web site here. If you enjoy the book, you’ll be happy to know that a trilogy is planned, Fukui is working on a prequel, Truancy Origins, to be published in early 2009, and will start on a sequel shortly thereafter. He plans to complete his work while still involved in the educational system (he plans to attend NYU). Fukui is worried about losing his anger at the system which inspired Truancy in the first place once he’s no longer entrenched in it. I was happy to hear that Fukui will be revisiting this world for a few reasons—whenever I read a dystopian novel, I always crave more information as to how the society got that way—was it a slow, almost imperceptible shift, or did change happen suddenly? Was resistance present from the beginning, or did the anger and frustration take a long time to build up? I’m also very curious about the backgrounds of Umasi and Zyid, and how they came to their very different belief systems and methods of resistance.
A good read for anyone who's already dreading going back to school in the fall.

Read this book and save the world

Jackie on Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:

Basically, in the wake of a massive terrorist attack, Homeland Security swoops down into an already security-conscience San Francisco and starts abusing their power, treating citizens (especially teens) as suspects. Marcus Yarrow, your average, everyday computer genius teen, having been kidnapped by the government, tortured, and let go, has sworn that he will fight Big Brother and return freedom to his city. More or less. Mostly he's just pissed that he got tortured, and that no one knows where his buddy is.

World-Shaking Sci-Fi

• The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein. Old-school rock-n-roll science fiction: fast, noisy and nuts with the fate of the world at stake.


• A Stainless Steel Rat is Born by Harry Harrison. First in a series. The Rat really is the galaxy's greatest crook, but somehow, he always ends up cheating only bad guys...


• Hospital Station by James White. The first in the Sector General series. Sector 12 General Hospital is a 384-level medical space station. It's located in deep space and designed to treat a wide variety of xenobiological life forms -- furred bipeds, methane breathers, and more.


• Pandora's Legions by Christopher Anvil. Fast paced, funny, good old space adventure, from the days when going to space didn't mean being a NASA scientist with a PhD, but being part of a unit who got the job done. Nobody looks too hard at the methods; all that matters is ...results. (Also under the heading 'War').


• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Peeing your pants laughing--it's not just for little kids anymore.


• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Will tomorrow's religions be based on today's scrap paper?


• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The other Ender books had a hard time living up to the first, but Ender's Shadow comes highly recommended.


• Gun with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. The hardboiled detective -- combined with some truly clever sci-fi weirdness, it's an awful lot of fun.


• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Somehow strikes the balance between awesome cyberpunk action novel and spoof of cyberpunk action novel. Hilarious and a classic, and a great intro to his other novels (The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon are also highly recommended).


• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. A true sci-fi classic that inspired the movie Blade Runner.


• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick's stuff is weird and awesome and maybe even mind-blowing. This book imagines America having lost World War II, and under the thumb of Nazi Germany and Japan.


• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. An ultra-violent fascist Britain as viewed by our teen narrator, the leader of a gang who gets caught up in the politics of correctional reformation and behavior modification. Told in a first-person gumbo of slang that includes archaic English and Russian words (the British Cold War fear was invasion and occupation when it was written) it's a bold piece of horror-show political and social satire.


• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. A fictitious Nobel laureate creates a substance called Ice-9 which, when it comes in contact with liquid water molecules, turns them all into ice at room temperature and could theoretically freeze the planet. Vonnegut adds a fictional Caribbean island run by a despotic leader (hailed by the US as "one of freedom's greatest friends"), and a religious leader with Zen-like beliefs into the mix, both of whom are competing for the attention of Nobel laureate's heirs who are in possession of Ice-9. Slaughterhouse Five usually gets all the attention, but might just be Vonnegut's best.


• Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder. Mindbending physics jammed into a swashbuckling adventure: inside a planet-sized space sphere, inhabitants experience atmosphere but not gravity, so they create spinning city states and miniature fusion suns and do battle like it's 1799 in wooden space ships. High adventure and huge ideas on almost every page = awesome-ness.


• The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson (graphic novel). This classic space epic begins in the slums of a bleak future and ends beyond the stars, following the unlikely hero Halo Jones as she just tries to achieve one thing: getting out.


• The Uglies sequence by Scott Westerfeld. In a post-apocalyptic world with hoverboards and rusted out cities, everyone gets plastic surgery at 16 that makes them beautiful. But is that really a good thing?


• Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford. A great coming of age novel set on the moon.


• Prowlers quartet by Christopher Golden. When Jack's best friend Artie dies, cops say it was a freak attack by wild dogs, something that will never happen again. Then Artie appears to Jack as a ghost and tells him what really happened: it was shapeshifters, Prowlers, things that look human but are definitely not. This quartet is action-packed and heart-racing. Wait 'til you read the scene at the subway station.


• War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The granddaddy of all alien invasion stories begins, "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's..."


• 1984 by George Orwell. People are political prisoners within their own country. Everyone is overseen via "telescreens" by Big Brother's Thought Police. Winston, a worker in the Record Department of The Ministry of Truth, finds himself resisting, not completely accepting the "news" as it is reported. Essential reading, even if (especially if) you don't like science fiction.