Drowning

I gave up on Ulysses. I caught the drift, and didn't feel like putting up with another 600 pages of it. Life is too short!

So instead I picked up 'The Drowned World' by JG Ballard. Another possibly pretentious escapade, but at least science fiction is fun! (And I like Ballard, all his books seem so interesting...)

I've only read maybe, 50 pages, but already I love it. This is from the blurb:

"Fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Nature is on the rampage. London has been transformed into a primeval swamp, and within its submerged landscape giant lizards, dragonflies and insects compete for dominance. Human fertility is in decline and buildings sink beneath waters infested with decaying matter. Into this wasteland a group of intrepid scientists venture to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. Soon, ghostly voices haunt their waking and nightmares permeate their sleep..."

Fantastic, huh?

It's a proper dystopia, and despite the cause of this 'global warming' being rather far-fetched, it's a scarily accurate pre-emptive and haunting vision of what's happening to our planet, and what it could become... There are lots of giant bugs, and that in itself is pretty bloody horrifying. He wrote it in the early 60's - spooky.

Anyway, I want to share this paragraph - of course my life and the protagonist's couldn't be more different (duh), but this little snapshot of thought seemed to resonate. Transplant stuff (did you expect anything else!?).

I seem to be caught in this odd form of withdrawal - it isn't unpleasant, far from it. It is strangely calming. I've described it as a bubble before, and it is. It just seems to be becoming larger and noticeably quieter. I don't want to make this looming 'metamorphosis' bigger than it actually is, but it's quite an interesting way of putting it. Things will have to adjust, things will have to change, and I suppose in a sense i'm preparing for this 'radically new environment' by distancing myself from my previously normal(ish) life, whether I was aware of this or not. I think i'm going to be spending a lot of time in this new 'internal landcape', re-adjusting to a life where things i've known before will suddenly become obsolete. Like the whole process of calculating insulin and creon - things that pretty much determine how I live my life, what I eat, what I can do, where I can go - suddenly i'll live my life (in parts) ungoverned by these rules i've seamlessly built in. It'll be so liberating, but I can imagine it'll be weird! Maybe by withdrawing i'm also just getting used to a sort of loneliness or isolation or boredom that soon i'll have no control over, as I lay stewing in crumpled clammy bed sheets hooked up to drips and lines and beeping machines. With messy hair. 

Today is 6 months on the waiting list. So much for 3 months eh! Pah! I don't know if it's gone fast or slow... I couldn't say. It's all a little mushy and formless. Sometimes time flies past so incredibly quick that I blink and suddenly realise the leaves have transformed from a luscious summery green to that luxuriously melancholy autumnal red. Other times, days couldn't drag by any slower, and every hour seems to stretch into an everlasting and bitter reminder of time's slow, cruel passing. Then all these moments blend together, swirl and dissolve into a jumbled and incoherent timeline of... nothing much. It's. so.     bloody.          odd.   

I think Ulysses and it's modernist ways have caused some form of brain damage. Damn you Joyce and your time altering powers! Hate to think what 600 more pages would've done...                    

U-tops and Dys-tops

I love Dystopias. I love Utopias. I did a course at uni about utopian and dystopian literature, and i've been obsessed ever since. I think it was the only course I actually read every single book on the reading list, plus more. I think what fascinated me the most was how the line between utopia and dystopia is not so clear cut, and how one can so easily merge into the other. It raises philosophical and moral debates that sometimes, you just can't answer. Happiness at the price of freedom anyone?

This is my list of my favs. Read them!

The Republic, Plato. OK, was made to read this one at uni. And I know what you're thinking. Plato? WTF? But this is the bedrock of all Utopian Lit. Plato has created his 'perfect' society. But is eugenics, sterilization, heirarchys and an intellectual elite really a Utopia...?

Gulliver's Travels, Swift. As Gulliver encounters all these weird and wonderous different worlds, each questions our own society and our own ideals, and actually whether our pursuit of perfection comes at a price. A master of critique and satire. Now let's extract sunbeams from cucumbers! Loved this book ever since that TV version in the 90's.

Erewhon, Samuel Butler. An anagram of 'nowhere', this Victorian satire presents a backwards place where for eg. criminals are treated as ill and the ill are treated as criminals. The most amazing part of the book is the last section, 'Book of the Machines' which is a scarrily accurate pre-curser to A.I - all machines have been destroyed as they thought they would develop a consciousness and take over...! You start to believe it. Now relevant more than ever. So glad my brother got this for me from the school library clearout. Good brother.

The Time Machine, H. G. Wells.  Set in the future in a world full of perfectly beautiful 'people' (the Eloi), but hiding a sinister underbelly, literally. 

1984, Orwell. BIG BRO IS WATCHING YOU.

Brave New World, Huxley. Artificial, drug induced happiness at the price of personal freedom? Very similar to Plato's Republic (yeah I wrote one of my dissertations comparing these two) - but one classed as a utopia and one as a dystopia. Which side are you on?

News From Nowhere, William Morris. Written in 1890 and set in London around NOW (!), this is Morris' ideal socialist utopia where London is a big happy rural place, no money, just trading, and the houses of Parliament are a place to store horse manure (lols). Would this ever work, or is it just a rich arty farty man's dream? Would you want it to work?!
 
Metropolis, Thea Von Harbou. A seemingly beautiful urban city full of the elite, yet powered by down-trodden workers. Echoes of The Time Machine. What is the price of creating a Utopia? Lots of Hitler overtones. The 1920's film by Fritz Lang is fantastic, with Von Harbou, his wife (aw bless), writing the screenplay. 

Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Women only world. No men! :-O So no war, no dominance, no conflict, no angst, and lots of artificial reproduction. A feminist paradise. But, of course, dark and questionable undertones.

The Trial/ The Castle, Kafka. Anything by Kafka is disturbingly dystopic. These two novels are perfect examples of the consequences of extreme bureaucracy, and one man's plight against the system. A nonsensical system that is.

WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin. This book inspired Orwell and Huxley to write their dystopias. The Daddy of the modern Dystopia. Love how everyone lives in completely glass flats, so everybody can see everything. You get dedicated 'sexy time' where you're allowed to close the blinds hehe. *Awkward much*


I really want to read:

The Drowned World, J G Ballard. Another novel set in London, this time in a Global-Warming heated up world. London is a tropical swamp, no polar ice caps, no-one lives around the equator. The Sun is close to earth in a sci-fi take. I think it's not so much as a utopian or dystopian social critique, but is definitely a dystopia!

The Island, Huxley. Huxley's take on a Utopia this time. Wonder if it'll stay a utopia... doubt it.

The Sleeper Awakes, H. G Wells. A man wakes up in the future, just like Morris' News From Nowhere.

Fatherland, Robert Harris. If Hitler had won the war. Hitler obviously was wanting to create a utopia by eliminating all what he deemed 'unsavory' within society. I imagine this finalised vision, and if you imagine it in real life, would be a perfect example of an extremely dystopian 'utopia'. When you think of trying to create a utopia in real life as opposed to fiction, it really is quite a terrifying concept. Paradise at a high price - a price that any sane man or women would never pay. I just don't think creating a complete utopia is ever possible. You have to destroy and eliminate too much, and there is absolutely nothing perfect about that.



Tell me of any sort of utopian or dystopian books you've read and would recommend! Any books that are set in a world that might seem perfect or really really awful. And, if at any point you thought 'actually, this bad world ain't too bad' or 'this ain't perfect you dumb ass!'

I read normal books too. I've read Twilight.