Download or read book Sporting Dystopias written by Ralph C. Wilcox and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaching beyond the popular celebration of commercial gains often associated with the proliferation of stadiums, events, and teams in the city, Sporting Dystopias explores the role of sport in the process of community building. Scholars from various fields, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, marketing, media studies, and sociology, examine the cultural, economic, and political interplay of sport and the city. The book systematically challenges the overwhelming claims of sport's benefit to the city as it scrutinizes the various tensions inherent in the relationship. Grounded in economic means, racial and ethnic affiliation, and the contestation for space, sport is seen as precipitating a broad range of human challenges.
Download or read book Threatening Dystopias written by Kasia Paprocki and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts. Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow. As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.
Download or read book The Iron Heel written by Jack London and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Anthony Meredith, a scholar in about the year 2600 AD (or 419 B.O.M. - the Brotherhood of Man), annotates the "Everhard Manuscript", an account that chronicles the years from 1912 to 1932 when the great "Iron Heel" oligarchy rose to power in the United States.
Download or read book Nordic Utopias and Dystopias written by Pia Maria Ahlbäck and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.
Download or read book The Queue written by Basma Abdel Aziz and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Weird and wild.” —BookRiot “An effective critique of authoritarianism.” —NPR “Equal parts dystopia, satire, and allegory. —Los Angeles Review of Books Set against the backdrop of a failed political uprising in Egypt, this chilling debut evokes Orwellian dystopia, Kafkaesque surrealism, and a very real vision of life after the Arab Spring. In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as ‘the Gate’ has risen to power in the aftermath of the ‘Disgraceful Events,’ a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer. Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet. Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life. Written with dark, subtle humor, The Queue describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.
Download or read book Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.
Download or read book Infinite Detail written by Tim Maughan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL! The Guardian's Pick for Best Science Fiction Book of the Year! A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis? AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure. The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It.
Download or read book Biopunk Dystopias written by Lars Schmeink and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.
Download or read book The Time Machine illustrated written by H. G. Wells and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.
Download or read book Character and Dystopia written by Aaron S. Rosenfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.
Download or read book Dystopia written by Janet McNulty and published by Speedy Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine living in a world where everything you do is controlled. In the distant future the United States has been split into two regions separated by a barren wasteland; this is the country of Dystopia. Here the individual is discouraged, freedom is an illusion, food is rationed, and everything you do is tracked by a chip implanted in your arm. This is Dana Ginary's world. At age seventeen, people receive their career assignments chosen for them by a government body. Forced to work at the Waste Management Plant because she was declared too individualistic, Dana finds herself surrounded by death and brutality. Knowing her days are numbered, she looks for a way to leave the plant before she, too, becomes one of its causalities. It is then she meets a man named George and soon finds herself caught up in a cat and mouse game between the resistance and the Dystopian government. Dana finds herself faced with an agonizing choice of whom she will betray and whom she will save: her friend George, her parents, or herself.
Download or read book Global Dystopias written by Junot Diaz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories, essays, and interviews explore dystopias that may offer lessons for the present. As the recent success of Margaret Atwood's novel-turned-television hit Handmaid's Tale shows us, dystopia is more than minatory fantasy; it offers a critical lens upon the present. “It is not only a kind of vocabulary and idiom,” says bestselling author and volume editor Junot Diaz. “It is a useful arena in which to begin to think about who we are becoming.” Bringing together some of the most prominent writers of science fiction and introducing fresh talent, this collection of stories, essays, and interviews explores global dystopias in apocalyptic landscapes and tech futures, in robot sentience and forever war. Global Dystopias engages the familiar horrors of George Orwell's 1984 alongside new work by China Miéville, Tananarive Due, and Maria Dahvana Headley. In “Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue,” award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders uses popularized stigmas toward transgender people to create a not-so-distant future in which conversion therapy is not only normalized, but funded by the government. Henry Farrell surveys the work of dystopian forebear Philip K. Dick and argues that distinctions between the present and the possible future aren't always that clear. Contributors also include Margaret Atwood and award-winning speculative writer, Nalo Hopkinson. In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, and climate denial, this collection poses vital questions about politics and civic responsibility and subjectivity itself. If we have, as Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to survive it. Contributors Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Bernhard, Mark Bould, Thea Costantino, Tananarive Due, Henry Farrell, JR Fenn, Maria Dahvana Headley, Nalo Hopkinson, Mike McClelland, Maureen McHugh, China Miéville, Jordy Rosenberg, Peter Ross, Sumudu Samarwickrama
Download or read book Make Room Make Room written by Harry Harrison and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detective hunts down a killer in a dystopian, overpopulated NYC in this classic science fiction novel that inspired the film Soylent Green. Originally published in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! imagines a world at the end of the twentieth century where Earth is so overwhelmed by rampant population growth that it teeters on the edge of self-destruction. In New York City alone, thirty-five million people are squeezed into its packed boroughs, scrambling like rats for the world’s dwindling resources. The only food available is a product called soylent. And while the government tries to maintain order, the rich get richer and the poor stay underfoot. Finding a killer in this broken world is one hell of a job. But that’s exactly what Det. Andy Rusch has been assigned to do. If he can stay alive long enough, he might just solve the biggest case he’s ever been on—unless humanity finally fulfills its promise and destroys itself first.
Download or read book The Handmaid s Tale written by Margaret Atwood and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.
Download or read book Welcome to Dystopia written by K. G. Anderson and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this diverse and vigorous mix of stories by newcomers and luminaries, writers offer their takes on what life might hold for us in the next few years. The resulting visions of war, oppression, and daily struggle are sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying (and occasionally both), but always thought-provoking.
Download or read book Lord of the World written by Robert Hugh Benson and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias written by David W. Sisk and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997-12-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 20th century has progressed, dystopian fiction has gained power as utopian fiction has become increasingly irrelevant. As an overtly didactic genre, dystopia extrapolates terrifying near-futures from disturbing current trends. In order to quickly create an atmosphere that is at once plausible and terrifying, dystopian writers almost universally turn to an idea certain to generate both fear and sympathy in the reader—the dual concept of language as the primary tool by which repressive societies stifle dissent, and simultaneously as the primary weapon used by rebels bent on understanding, resisting, and countering such oppression. This volume traces the evolution of language's centrality in 20th-century dystopias in English, including Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Handmaid's Tale, Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, and Riddley Walker. The brilliance of Orwell's 1984 has led to a backlash: many critics have smugly asserted that, as the year 1984 has passed without taking the shape of his fiction, Orwell's novel and the dystopia in general have lost their affective power and relevance. But as the 20th century progresses, dystopian fiction has gained power as utopian fiction has become increasingly irrelevant. As an overtly didactic genre, dystopia extrapolates terrifying near-futures from disturbing current trends. In order to quickly create an atmosphere that is at once plausible and terrifying, dystopian writers almost universally turn to an idea certain to generate both fear and sympathy in the reader—the dual concept of language as the primary tool by which repressive societies stifle dissent, and simultaneously as the primary weapon used by rebels bent on understanding, resisting, and countering such oppression. This volume traces the evolution of language's centrality in 20th-century dystopias in English, beginning with Huxley's ^IBrave New World^R and Orwell's ^I1984^R. As dystopian fiction has branched out to embrace multiple viewpoints and agendas, the emphasis on language has remained at the center of the dystopian impulse. These include the first-person narrative dystopia, such as Anthony Burgess's ^IA Clockwork Orange^R; the feminist dystopia, such as Margaret Atwood's ^IThe Handmaid's Tale^R and Suzette Elgin's ^INative Tongue^R and ^IThe Judas Rose^R; and the post-apocalyptic/mythic dystopia, such as Russell Hoban's ^IRiddley Walker^R. While other scholars have often alluded to the importance of language within specific literary dystopias, this book transcends earlier studies by presenting a generic model of dystopian language use.
