International Students Guide: Dystopia/ Satire

The story takes place is a run-down version of London, following Alex, a gang leader whose two loves are gratuitous violence and classical music. After a robbery gone bad, Alex ends us a test subject for a new treatment to turn bad men good. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"

The animals at Mr. Jones’ Manor Farm assemble in the barn to hear old Major talk about a dream he had. He talked about how his dream was where all the animals lived free from masters. Soon after Major dies the rest of the animals wanted to live out his dream. So they plot to take over the farm and get rid of the humans. They proceed with their plans and their rebellion is a success. They make policies and a government for the farm. Later on, Jones and his men return to the farm and attempt to retake it, but the tactics of Snowball, the animals defeat Jones in The Battle of the Cowshed. But this victory is far from the happy ending. Reading Animal Farms, one begins to recognize the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organization.

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young woman has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.

The story follows a reporter named John. John wants to write a book Felix Hoennikker, who was one of the principle engineers of the atomic bomb. While investigating him, he meets many things: a new religion called Bokononism, a stone angel, a philosophical dwarf, a Hoosier, and a chemical more dangerous than the A-bomb itself. A satire fiction, Cat’s Cradle envisions a future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

In a future society, books are forbidden and "firemen" responsible for burning the remaining titles. That's the job of one Guy Montag, but he begins to question his role as he gets in contact with a teenager who reads secretly. And he becomes himself a criminal reader of smuggled books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature. Classic and frightening, Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t give you all the answers, instead, it wants you to ask them.

In this chilling novel, Anderson imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies' attributes in the conception aprium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School. But everything changes when he and his pals travel to the moon for spring break. A terrifying depiction of the fate of the Digital Age, FEED opens our eyes to a seemingly unlikely future.

One touch is all it takes. One touch and Juliette Ferrars can leave a fully grown man gasping for air. One touch and she can kill.No one knows why Juliette has such incredible power. It feels like a curse, a burden that one person alone could never bear. But The Reestablishment sees it as a gift, sees her as an opportunity. An opportunity for a deadly weapon.Juliette has never fought for herself before. But when she’s reunited with the one person who ever cared about her, she finds a strength she never knew she had. The first book in its series, SHATTER ME gives a promising start to an incredible journey.

Offred was a normal everyday woman with a career, a name, a life like all women have come to expect and take for granted in this age. When the Religious Right came into power, they began to put into practice their insane beliefs which strip women of their identity, their rights, their body, their very name. Offred must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because, in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Disturbing and realistic, this is a story that is going to blow off your mind.

From the catalog: In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

Todd Hewitt lives in a world in which all women are dead, and the thoughts of men and animals are constantly audible as Noise. Graphically represented by a set of scratchy fonts and sentence fragments that run into and over each other, Noise is an oppressive chaos of words, images, and sounds that make human company exhausting and no thought truly private. When Todd captures that tiny moment of silence, he knows he must do something to save it. Thus, began his story. This troubling, unforgettable opener to the Chaos Walking trilogy is a penetrating look at the ways in which we reveal ourselves to one another, and what it takes to be a man in a society gone horribly wrong.