Ahmed Khaled Towfik, Utopia, 2009

Sometime in the mid-21st Century, Utopia exists as a large enclave of well-off Egyptians, living behind high walls on the north Egyptian coastline and protected by the US military. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been left to descend into anarchy and barbarism. One of the sports favoured by the affluent and bored Utopian youth is to venture outside Utopia’s walls and return with a trophy – usually a body part of some semi-feral non-Utopian – and when one such venture goes wrong the antagonists are on the receiving end of an unexpectedly beneficial turn of events. You could reasonably expect Utopia to be a rather brutal bildungsroman, but the life lessons taught to the selfish Utopians are not learned, in fact they’re rejected in favour of a restatement of their born superiority. This is a well-written and rather chilling book, as might be expected of the Arab world’s leading writer of horror and fantasy, and is one that I cautiously recommend. Towfik spares no polite sensibilities the reader may have – no characters are particularly likeable or even admirable, and they are all put through their own versions of hell. Utopia was first published in Arabic in 2009 more than a year before the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, yet in a brief note at the beginning Towfik states he believes a place like Utopia will certainly exist in Egypt in the near future. Such is the depth of cynicism on display here that I doubt any of that sentiment will have changed.  PY

MORE ON AHMED KHALED TAWFIK : WIKIPEDIA

Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life, 1968

Though it depicts a future dystopia, A Very Private Life is actually less a science fiction novel and more a futurist fairy tale. The young female protagonist Uncumber lives in a sterile underground world in which personal privacy is paramount, being a cultural reaction against the invasions of privacy that began in the 20th century. Emotions must be drug-induced to be acceptable, babies are made at the factory when you provide the ingredients, and dark glasses are the only item of clothing because they help keep your feelings to yourself. But, being a bit of a rebel, Uncumber looks for something more tactile and goes on her way to the outside world in search of Noli, a surface-living man she accidentally encountered on her holovision TV. He turns out to be a selfish low class polygamist among other things, and her situation get worse from there. As an allegory for the dangers of withdrawal from the world A Very Private Life works well but the story never really comes alive as anything other than a mild comedy of manners. Yes, life is always far more complex than we can perceive from a naïve standpoint, but that observation seems self-evident from the beginning and the development of this theme never really moves beyond second gear.  PY

MORE ON MICHAEL FRAYN : CONTEMPORARY WRITERS PROFILE   |  WIKIPEDIA

Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975

Some may have been thinking this inclusion on the SF Masterworks list is well overdue, and they’re probably right. Russ plays a part in her own novel (her most famous) about alternates of herself that may exist out there in the multiverse, with the broad differences between them being defined along the lines of their degrees of emancipation. By including herself in her novel even though she largely takes a back seat, this seemed to be the most honest way Russ could explore the subject of women’s unequal role in society by comparing four possible universes, one of which is her own. The most prominent is of course the Joanna Russ that is Janet Evason, inhabitant of a far future Earth renamed Whileaway in which men died out in a selective plague 800 years previously; then there’s the Russ that is Jeannine Dadier from an alternate present in which WW2 never happened and American women are universally the stay-at-home types, and the fourth Russ is Jael Reasoner, combatant in a protracted and violent future war against men, who brought the four of them together for purposes she will eventually reveal. Russ does not fire off her flaming arrows at only the men, as her female characters often come in for an equally tough critique. She wrote the story scattergun-fashion with the four different points of view interchanging frequently and denying the reader any chance of experiencing a straightforward narrative, however the novel still hangs together nicely and the unusual composition is a major part of the book’s originality.

On publication The Female Man may have been a wake-up call for the men at the time who were prepared to take it on, as it is undeniably didactic. As a sequel to her Nebula Award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’, it’s probably fair to say Russ’s prickly and often very humourous rants are a little less reflective, directly, of the experience of Western women today. However much things have improved and however much the battleground may have shifted, the objective hasn’t: the glass ceiling is still there and the ongoing battles for equality of opportunity in the West are still no less important than those that went before. The Female Man can still put fire in the belly of feminists everywhere, including myself, and while it’s probably a layer or two beneath the current strata of feminist experience and thinking (that evolution could certainly be commented on better by others, not myself) it was certainly pivotal to some of the feminist literature that came after. However much this was a product of its day, its age is beginning to show a little and that’s actually something to celebrate, as its impassioned and very likeable ending itself makes clear. Certainly a masterwork, and still an invigorating book which I’m glad to have finally read.  PY

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Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner, 1969

This new Penguin edition of Disch’s novelisation – the one that, in his lifetime, he resented every reprint of – is timed to coincide with the recent miniseries remake. Disch contracted to write this for a small fee while particularly short of cash, even before he caught a few episodes of it on US television, and he felt no particular affinity to the series but went on to create his own kind of embellishment on what he had seen with little regard as to how his novel might match the series’ end result. It certainly diverges from it in any number of ways, but that’s possibly explained by the (very likely grafted on) notion that this was meant as a sequel: Number 6 has been recaptured, and he goes through the motions once more with similar tenacity but with a very different set of results. I didn’t see this as a sequel at all, but I like the notion that The Prisoner’s deliberately inexplicable nature can give rise to different interpretations and outcomes from its themes. Given the circumstances of its conception this isn’t considered a great Disch novel – understandably so, although I still found it to be elegant throughout, particularly the eloquent cat-and-mouse dialogue between Number 6 and Number 2 which felt exactly as it should, and which gives an indication of why Disch was probably right to be offered this gig: he made a more mentally stimulating job of it than, say, Philip K. Dick possibly would have, despite some multiple-identity and dystopian overtones that would now be considered Dickian. Certainly one for the completists of either Disch or The Prisoner, but in many ways actually better than might be expected.  PY

MORE ON THOMAS M. DISCH : ENDZONE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Bjorn Turmann, The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, 2010

Just occasionally the novels you discover at airports are not your typical airport novels. They tease you with nondescript jacket designs and instead draw you in with a well-written cover blurb. They’re wrapped in cellophane or produced by a very small publishing house, or they come in very limited print runs. In the case of The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, all the above apply.

Just a few chapters into The Last Tobacco Shop in the World it becomes apparent this is an unexpected and original take on the future – one in which natural disasters are created as aphrodisiacs, in which smokers are hunted down and murdered by the state, in which interior lighting has the ability to sense human needs. My interest was sustained for over 300 pages mostly because of the tight and interesting way Turmann has with dialogue, particularly between strangers getting to know each other: they talk obliquely to produce conversations that zig-zag their way to their point. There are also some very neat future ideas in this story, set in the year 2040 on a new island called Jarangwa, a tiny slice of post-tsunami geological apocalyptica thrown up by the Andaman Sea off Thailand in 2004. Anton Brick is a freelance ‘syrup monkey’, chasing down ever-diminishing fringe supplies of oil in Iraq, then while staying in Cambodia he’s offered, and takes, a PR job at the only hotel on Jarangwa, one of the few places on Earth where it’s still entirely legal to smoke tobacco. The rest of the planet is a mess of plagues and worldwide Orwellian governmental forces that have banned love, premarital sex, small firearms (big firearms being harder to conceal) and, of course, smoking. But Anton discovers that the guests at this hotel are an unusually strange crowd including a repentant ex-spammer and a Mongolian ex-prostitute (by far the most interesting and well-drawn character), some with frightening personal ambitions and dangerously complex personalities.

Plot and setting aside, Turmann’s obvious strength is his dialogue. It’s the aspect of this novel that will probably draw the reader completely into it, with a side-effect of making one feel a little trapped inside, Prisoner-like, as one tries to figure out where this small cast of ill-matched characters is heading: occasionally as the reader I felt like the protagonist Anton, a blank slate always being kept a little in the dark and always well out of his depth. This is an enigmatic and slightly twisted novel, more slipstream than science fiction, and it’s also one of the most off-beat books I’ve read for a long time. It kept me reading less for its distinct strangeness, which is actually understated, and more for its promise, which is considerable. It has one obvious geographical error (and a rather unforgivable one as it’s relevant to the plot) which is that a boat cannot get from Cambodia’s Rabbit Island to Phuket unless it circumnavigates the entire Malay Peninsula, a journey that could not be done in a day – for convenience Turmann seems to have somehow relocated Phuket and the Andaman Sea on the other side of Thailand. That problem notwithstanding, as I write there are only 600 copies of Tobacco Shop in the world, but there ought to be plenty more as in my humble opinion this novel deserves the interest of a bigger publisher.

Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

MORE ON HARRY HARRISON : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration, 1967

Thomas Disch was never as fashionable within the science fiction community as he deserved, and at the time of first publication Camp Concentration was perhaps (to take a very long view of things) outplayed by Daniel Keyes’s slightly more reader-friendly novel Flowers for Algernon which had been published some months earlier, explores the same theme of artificially enhanced intelligence, is hard-hitting in its own way but then is also, undeniably, outstripped by Disch’s combination of erudition, creativity and political cynicism. Camp Concentration also contains ideas that might look unnervingly close to the present dystopia: America has declared war on the world and its government is experimenting on conscientious objectors. Maybe now that Disch has sadly left us this deserves to be considered a classic of 20th Century fiction: forgive the superlatives but it’s a masterpiece of understated black comedy and still a deliciously wicked book.  PY

MORE ON THOMAS M. DISCH : ENDZONE  |  WIKIPEDIA

James Morrow, City of Truth, 1990

The 1992 Nebula-winning novella that Morrow expanded from his short story ‘Veritas’. Morrow has never really caught on in the UK, and more’s the pity. City of Truth depicts the utopian city Veritas, where lying and anything less than complete honesty has been conditioned out of human communication, while it is under seige from the rebel ‘dissemblers’ of the hidden city of Satirev. Jack Sperry believes he must go from a ridiculous extreme to an absurd one as he learns to lie in an attempt to save his young son from a fatal disease. Morrow’s notable wit, very prominent in the first half, is gradually replaced by a sadness that shows how neither extreme of truth or untruth is ideal. A very good if rather implausible satire, and one that favourably compares with Vonnegut in Morrow’s exploration of the ridiculous.  PY

MORE ON JAMES MORROW :  AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  LIVE JOURNAL  |  WIKIPEDIA

Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938

Rand wrote this at the same time as she was working on The Fountainhead, so the two books share the theme of asserting individuality over collective living (the edition available today is her revised 1946 version). This is a very straightforward story but also a rather overworked parable, in which a future society populated by people who are numbered rather than named exists without the concept of ‘I’, instead only having ‘we’ with which to express themselves, and collectivism is enforced almost as a religion. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, rather unbelievably gets to do everything all by his very resourceful self: stumble upon a lost source of ancient knowledge, make scientific discoveries singlehanded, suffer cruel punishment for his good fortune, escape from jail, win the most beautiful girl and discover the Unspeakable Word. And rather uniquely, because of Equality’s upbringing most of Anthem is told only using the first and third persons plural. Any atheist who has shaken off an earlier religion will, similarly, probably understand some of Rand’s antipathy to her roots, and her loathing for Russian collectivism informs the whole story. The influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is also there in the background, despite being thematically rather different. This is not a natural or free-flowing tale at all, it’s (necessarily) linguistically clumsy and way too earnest, but as a vision of a mind breaking free from imposed constraints it displays its own kind of self-conscious dystopian perfection.  PY

MORE ON AYN RAND :  THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

Welcome to OneState, a soulless totalitarian regime based on mathematical principles, reason, logic and the efficiency models of the 19th century management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor. The designer of the spacecraft known as the Integral, the mathematician known only as D-503, has love and pity for the life found elsewhere in the solar system, considering them as yet uncivilized by the missionary nature of the Integral’s forthcoming journey. D-503’s diary entries depict a cold and unemotional civilization: OneState is obsessed with its own mathematical perfection, a dictatorship run through with expansionist dogma and rhetoric that it will impose on whatever aliens are encountered out there in the universe. But then there are his misadventures with the rebel movement Mephi and his infatuation with the woman I-330, both of which take his eye off the ball and force OneState to intervene. We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau and wasn’t published in Russia until 1988, despite having already inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s easy to see why this short dystopian masterpiece is considered to be among the greatest of its kind; described by its most recent translator Clarence Brown as a “clunky old postmodern monster” it feels very much of its time yet retains a great deal of charm, not least because D-503 knows he is not writing for posterity or his contemporaries but for his wild and remote ancestors, us.  PY

MORE ON YEVGENY ZAMYATIN :  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOVIET WRITERS  |  WIKIPEDIA

Franck Pavloff, brown, 2001

Two easy-going friends are living under a regime that is gradually tightening its grip. New laws are introduced stating that brown pets are healthier, stronger and eat less than other animals. So as not to upset the authorities they trade in their differently coloured pets for brown ones. Other colours start to disappear, first the cats, then the dogs, then the people...

brown is nothing less than a very succinct short story that first appeared in France as 'Matin Brun', published by a small press more famed for its poetry, and is now available in English with a small commentary about its origin and subsequently very colourful life. It was written by Pavloff (a psychologist and son of a Bulgarian anarchist) as a response to French local elections in 1998 when it was discovered that mainstream political parties had made secret alliances with the extreme right wing Front National. Through word of mouth it has since been used to debate totalitarianism with the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, and has since sold at least 600,000 copies.  PY

MORE ON FRANCK PAVLOFF : FRENCH WIKIPÉDIA

Derek Raymond, A State of Denmark, 1964

A pull-quote on the back cover of the most recent edition describes this as “alternative science fiction on the scale of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which is, frankly, rubbish: this doesn’t have the same imaginative scope, even remotely, though it is certainly a descendant of that more famous dystopia. A British socialist Prime Minister of the 1960s called Jobling reveals his true colours and quickly turns England into a relentless dictatorship, while Wales and Scotland secede from the United Kingdom and the Left just rolls over and dies. Set against Jobling is Richard Watt, a political journalist living under self-imposed exiled in Italy; this exotic and rather languorous setting for the first half of the book sets a pace that creaks along, but it’s there mostly to draw parallels with Mussolini. The second half is more descriptive of England under dictatorship and starts off far more boisterous, though endures to a downbeat finale of unceasing hopelessness. Serpent’s Tail reissued this pulp novel posthumously in 2007; it’s different from the usual English noir Robin Cook (as Derek Raymond) offered up but in places it’s plausible – a small warning that, actually, it could happen here if we let our guard down. Cautiously recommended, because in truth I suspect any aspiring British dictator would encounter far more resistance than is portrayed here.  PY

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Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962

The small but important differences between the original book and Stanley Kubrick's brutal film are not often commented on. This is still, thankfully, not yet a book to be noted for being a prediction, instead as a warning it seems to have functioned very well largely as a result of Kubrick’s truncated adaptation. But what was lost to Kubrick – he was unaware of the book’s final chapter because it was omitted from US editions – is a final sense of personal sympathy for the violent and unreliable teenage narrator, Alex. It’s actually what keeps the book alive and relevant because Burgess came down clearly on the side of his distinctly amoral anti-hero, despite having been driven to write A Clockwork Orange out of personal experience and loss from precisely the kind of violence he describes. It must have been difficult to write for that reason alone, though when set against the even greater amorality of a misguided government trying to deal effectively with youth crime it’s clear the book emerged out of Burgess asking himself some hard questions while still feeling a justifiable rage. Which makes the book a moral one, and far easier to experience than the film despite the complexities of Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, which somehow also serves to veil the violence. Of which there’s plenty.  PY

MORE ON ANTHONY BURGESS : THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION  |  WIKIPEDIA

Bernard Beckett, Genesis, 2006

Anaximander is a student hoping to gain entry into The Academy, the austere, near-future governing body of all that's left of a plague-ridden humanity, existing in a dystopian, fenced-off New Zealand. Her specialised area of study is the life of Adam Forde, the person who unwittingly changed everything for the better, and as a lead-in to this short book that’s just about all your given. What you’re not told before starting this well crafted page-turner is everything else this book turns out to be: philosophical enquiry, mystery, internal puzzle, a consistent future history, a conspiracy, a ‘singularity novel’ of sorts, and hence a rich read indeed. Some biblical references are perhaps inevitable but they really don’t get in the way. Genesis has won several New Zealand literary awards already and is published in the UK in both adult and young adult editions. This is well worth picking up if you come across it; I wasn’t expecting anything as consistently good as this and more awards may yet beckon.  PY

MORE ON BERNARD BECKETT : NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL PROFILE  |  WIKIPEDIA

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

It’s getting harder to believe there was once a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four was just a useful piece of socialist political science fiction, a somewhat far-fetched thought experiment though clearly a proverbial canary in the coal mine to the British political intelligentsia. Instead the intervening years have seen us brought considerably closer to too many aspects of Eric Blair’s vision, particularly with respect to surveillance in the UK and the conduct of political hypocrisies on a global scale. As a warning Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to serve the Western world very well indeed, and one wishes Russian and Chinese literature could have come up with equally potent fables of their own that would have had a similarly enlightening effect on their own populations and a restraining effect on their leaders: the intervening sixty years since it was written have often resonated with sentences and passages from this book that could be read as historical fact in parts of the world – the excesses of Russian and Chinese communism particularly, the former which Orwell feared English Socialism had a real danger of resembling – or echoes of the world’s present nervous condition, in which realities are habitually fabricated for entire populations in a way that would horrify our ancestors. Necessarily (and thankfully) extreme, it has inevitably become one of the defining books of the twentieth century, and with the invention of Newspeak has also made a useful and indelible stamp on the English language and conceptual thought everywhere. Doubleplusgood.  PY