Technological Dystopias

Who says summer is just for beach reads? These 9 books are technological dystopias, which is a genre that explores what happens when governments and corporations use technology to control access to resources and provide more power for the already powerful. Ironic, isn’t it, that we’re sharing this list on Facebook and that half of the titles are only available as eBooks.
Here’s a link to a list of the 5 physical books we have at the library –  https://decorah.biblionix.com/?booklist=25919

The rest are all on Bridges (https://bridges.overdrive.com/) which you can access with your DPL account number and password (usually your 10 digit phone number)

Thanks to Hannah, who came up with this list idea and helped compile the books while job shadowing at the DPL last week!

 

The cover of the book "Version Control" by Dexter Palmer. It features distorted and glitchy text with the author's name and a face in the background. There's a blurb at the top praising the book as "exhilarating" and a "thoughtful, powerful overhaul of the age-old time travel tale" by NPR.Version Control

Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband’s decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine.

Emotionally powerful and stunningly visionary, Version Control will alter the way you see your future and your present.

Bridges Link – Version Control

Cover of the book "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. The foreground features a person riding an elephant with a futuristic, dystopian cityscape in the background. The cover includes a quote praising the book and highlights its Hugo and Nebula awards.The Windup Girl

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko. Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

Bridges Link – The Windup Girl

 

The cover of "The House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer features a large, vivid image of a blue scorpion on a black background. The title is prominently displayed in red text. Three award seals are visible on the left, indicating the book's critical acclaim.The House of the Scorpion

Matteo Alacrán was not born; he was harvested. His DNA came from El Patrón, lord of a country called Opium—a strip of poppy fields lying between the United States and what was once called Mexico. Matt’s first cell split and divided inside a petri dish. Then he was placed in the womb of a cow, where he continued the miraculous journey from embryo to fetus to baby. He is a boy now, but most consider him a monster—except for El Patrón. El Patrón loves Matt as he loves himself, because Matt is himself.

As Matt struggles to understand his existence, he is threatened by a sinister cast of characters, including El Patrón’s power-hungry family, and he is surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards. Escape is the only chance Matt has to survive. But escape from the Alacrán Estate is no guarantee of freedom, because Matt is marked by his difference in ways he doesn’t even suspect.

 

Cover of the book "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. The design features a bold red background with a circular maze-like symbol in the center. The title and author's name are in black text. Press reviews and a note about the movie adaptation are also displayed.The Circle

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.

What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

 

Book cover of "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. The cover features a close-up of a woman's eyes behind a large blue flower. The title and author's name are in bold yellow text. Above the flower, there's a quote from The New Yorker praising the book.Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a bioengineered plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

 

 

 

The cover of the book "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro features a close-up of a young girl's face with blue eyes. The title and author's name are displayed across her face, with a gold Nobel Prize in Literature emblem. A review quote is at the top.Never Let Me Go

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is modern classic.

 

A book cover with a fluorescent green background featuring the name "William Gibson" at the top. Below, an abstract silhouette of a person is composed of black, overlapping, and twisting lines. The word "Neuromancer" is written repeatedly across the face area.Neuromancer

Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Bridges Link – Neuromancer

 

 

By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force.Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force.

 

Book cover of "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan. The cover features a man in a suit holding a firearm, angled with white diagonal lines across him. The title "Altered Carbon" is written vertically along the left edge. A banner indicates it's now a Netflix series.Altered Carbon

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold.

Bridges Link Altered Carbon


Posted: May 24, 2021