Anaiya is an elite Peacekeeper tasked to guard the Co-operative of Otpor from Unorthodoxy. Bred to be competitive, she strives to be the best – but when Resistance rises in the Precincts, the best way to bring it down is to join it. In a culture that defines its people by their dominant Element, can a passionless, disciplined Fire Elemental believably become a Bohemian Element of Air?
In a deeply different nearly now, Britain is ruled by the Equals – those with the Skill to assert their rights. UnSkilled commoners owe ten years of their lives in slave labour, with no protection under the law. As they begin their slavedays, the Hadley siblings find themselves at the heart of the fight for the future.
When an assassination attempt goes awry, Regan is left with no memory of who, what or where he is. Club singer Evelyn Calliope – like Regan, more than she seems – takes him under her wing. But they live in a quarantined police state, and Regan is on a Kill List. Welcome to Parole, the doomed city suspended above a river of fire.
Manchester, 2025. Real food is scarce. Public services are run by crime syndicates. Drones guard the motorways. And someone is trafficking people across dimensions, stealing their memories, their voices, their names in the pursuit of profit. As dystopian near-futures go, Graft cuts close to the bone in every sense.
Brian Meredith is a disabled man in a dystopian near-future.
He’s the least likely (and least likeable) person to hold the fate of the country in his hands. Prepare yourself for tomorrow: it’s going to be bleak.
In a shockingly prescient nearly-now, books have been banned, considered damaging to public happiness. Montag, a fireman, torches them for a living. But when a woman commits suicide rather than give up her books, he becomes tempted to try and understand their dangerous appeal.
I commented a while back that this was at risk of turning into nothing but a bookblog, and I suspect that 2014 will see it go one step further and become largely dormant as my bookblogging transitions across to LibraryThing. However, I started so I’ll finish – my final round-up of 2013 before my look back at the year to see whether any of it was really up to scratch.
Yes, I’m procrastinating. Two posts in one day? What else could possibly be going on? I’ve got a document to draft by Tuesday, and I meant to have it finished by Thursday evening. It’s far from done, so I’m crossing off other bits of mental laundry so that tomorrow can be as productive as physically/mentally possible. Terrifyingly, it’s nearly 6 months since I last jotted notes here on my recent reading. In the meantime, I’ve finished 32 books (what can I say, the longer commute and the part-time work suit me down to the ground). As last time, links go to my commentary elsewhere online.
Anderson Lake is a Calorie Man, hunting Bangkok’s markets for foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the windup girl Emiko – one of the New People, engineered to satisfy a rich man’s whims, then abandoned to the slums. Welcome to a near-future where oil has run out, seas are rising, and food safety is in the hands of a ruthless few.
When Sweden decides to declare certain people ‘dispensable’ – for aging when single, childless, or otherwise not deemed essential to society – they are moved to Units to support medical research. Expect this hard-hitting political dystopia be every bit as difficult to read as it sounds.
onemore.org 