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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Best Dystopia [Diverse] (Nominations Needed)

What is the best (worst?) dystopia (not written by a cishet white man)?

This poll is from our Year of Diverse Polls, and as such it can't includes authors who are cishet white men. Please adjust your nominations accordingly.

The world is in ruins. Or maybe it's not in ruins but there's just something a little off. Or maybe it's perfect, but the price is the torturous misery of a single innocent child. Or maybe there's some ham handed analog for racism that's going on between the white kids' strange methods of dividing themselves up by SAT vocabulary words. In any case it's a dystopia, and it is doing its literary work to hold up a twisted mirror to our own society.

The Rules:

1- As always, I leave the niggling to your best judgement because I'd rather be inclusive. If you feel like J.K. Rowling writes dystopia, I'm not going to argue. (Though you might need to "show your work" to get anyone to second your nomination.) If you think Pern is a dystopia, nominate it. I won't be enforcing any rules about it being future Earth or anything.

2- Since dystopias are a setting, they can be for a single book, a series, or several series.

3- You may nominate two (2) dystopias. Two is the number of nominations. Neither one nor three shall ye nominate. And four is right out. I will NOT take any dystopias beyond the second that you suggest. (I will consider a long list to be "seconds" if someone else nominates them as well.)

3- You may (and should) second as many nominations of others as you wish. So stop back in and see if anyone has put up something you want to see go onto the poll.

4- Please put your nominations here. I will take dystopias nominated only as comments on this post. (No comments on FB posts or G+.)

5- You are nominating WRITTEN DYSTOPIAS, not their movie portrayals. CGI is making the Insurgent movies pretty fun to look at, but if you find the books to be a little contrived, you shouldn't nominate them.

6- No more endless elimination rounds. I will take somewhere between 8-20 best performing titles and at MOST run a single semifinal round. So second the titles you want even if they already have one. (Yes, I guess that would make them thirds, fourths, etc...)

69 comments:

  1. The Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

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  2. The Big Bah-Ha by C.S.E. Cooney
    Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

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  3. The Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin
    The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

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  4. Who Fears Death by N. Okorafor fits here too.
    The Giver by Lois Lowry

    It's just non-cishet white man, right? So any variation of any one qualifier fits?

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  5. Best - Octavia Butler - Xenogenises series

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  6. The Lion of Senet, Jennifer Fallon
    The Medair Duoligy, Andrea K Host

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  7. Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower) by Octavia E. Butler

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  8. Oryx and Crake (just the first book of the trilogy tho)

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  9. The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi

    Winter of Fire by Sheryl Jordan

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  10. Never Let Me Go - K Ishiguro
    The Handmaid's Tale - M Atwood

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  11. Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood
    Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor

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  12. Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody

    The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

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  13. The Newsflesh universe by Mira Grant.

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  14. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  15. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
    Handmaid’s tale - Margaret Atwood

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    Replies
    1. Second both 1q4 and handmaid's (likely redundant at this point, but..)

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  16. How about Don't Bite the Sun/Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee as one dystopia. I wanna think some more on a second one.

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  17. The Six Duchies of Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy are, I think, grim enough to qualify for this. (They’re also one of my favorite settings in spec fiction.) Also, Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series.

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  18. The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow
    The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood

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  19. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
    Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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    Replies
    1. I can't in good conscience second All The Birds in the Sky, but I did want to give you points for recognizing that it's dystopian.

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    2. Scrolled until I found Station Eleven. Seconded.

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  20. Lord of the Flies- William Golding

    Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro

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    Replies
    1. Was Golding LGBTQ+? White and male. Unless he was LGBTQ+, doesn't count.

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    2. Didn't make it regardless. Poll is already up

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  21. The Fifth Sacred thing - Starhawk

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  22. The Testament of Jessie Lamb, By Jane Rogers
    Only Ever Yours, by Louise O'Neill

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  23. I'll add to all the seconds for Broken Earth and Handmaid's Tale.

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  24. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. Both the novel and the manga were incredible.

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  25. The Last One by Alexandra Oliva.
    Newsflesh series by Mira Grant.

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  26. The Fifth Sacred Thing Starhawk
    Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood

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  27. Nominations:
    1. Invitation to the Game by Monica Hughes

    2. The Hunger Games trilogy

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  28. Unwind, by Neal Shusterman
    Divergent (the series, not just the first book. The way that Divergent directly challenges and complicates the ubiquitous and troubling pattern in dystopian YA of acting as though a much higher average standard of living isn't worth the tradeoff of not being able to choose your own job doesn't really become clear until the second book, and it's got the most functional model of resistance of any of the popular ones).

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  29. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
    Facing the Storm -Jennifer Brooks
    Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

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  30. The city of ember - Jeanne duPrau

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  31. The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas - a truly disturbing set of books.

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  32. Peace fire by Amber Bird.

    Near future dystopian featuring wearables and shifty corporations.

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  33. Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing

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  34. "The Broken Earth Trilogy" by N K Jemisin
    And "The Sudden Appearance of Hope" by Claire North

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