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You are being watched. Your every movement is being tracked, your every word recorded. Your spouse may be an informer, your children may be listening at your door, your best friend may be a member of the secret police. You are alone among thousands, among great crowds of the brainwashed, the well-behaved, the loyal. Productivity has never been higher, the media blares, and the army is ever triumphant. One wrong move, one slip-up, and you may find yourself disappeared -- swallowed up by a monstrous bureaucracy, vanished into a shadowy labyrinth of interrogation chambers, show trials, and secret prisons from which no one ever escapes. Welcome to the world of the dystopia, a world of government and society gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong. What happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life? From 1984 to The Handmaid's Tale, from Children of Men to Bioshock, the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force. Brave New Worlds collects the best tales of totalitarian menace by some of today's most visionary writers, including Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Orson Scott Card, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny? Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.… (more)
This is a very big book of very depressing stories. Read it in small doses.
The stories themselves are mixed, and range from classics that I'm glad to finally have a legal copy of (like Ursula le Guin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas"--any thinking, literate, even moderately leftish person should read this story at some point in their lives) to duds (Orson Scott Card is not a bad writer but his story in this collection, about an unfixable plague that reduces human life expectancy to the early-mid twenties as a biospheric reaction to what people have done to the planet, just doesn't work). Fortunately there were enough good stories from new-to-me authors to justify reading through the whole thing, front to back, in fifteen-minute lunch-break increments. "Red Card," "Amaryllis," "Dead Space for the Unexpected," "Jordan's Waterhammer" and "Resistance" were stand-outs. ( )
This was circulated by John Joseph Adams in 2012 as part of that year's Hugo voter packet in support of his case for the Best Professional Editor, Short Form category. There are some stories missing from this version which were in the print version - "Billennium" by J.G. Ballard, "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury, "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick, "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut - though everything else seems to be there, including "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman" by Harlan Ellison. There are also three original stories, one of which came second in that year's Hugos (though to be honest I ranked it in last place).
I was struck by just how many of the stories focussed on future dystopian interference with reproductive or sexual rights. Of course, it's not absent from the classic dystopian novels - state regulation of sex is a key element of Zamyatin's We, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World - but for them it is one of several elements combining to create oppression. By contrast, my rough tally is that more than half of the stories in Brave New Worlds take it as a central theme.
They are all pretty good and some of them are very good stories. There is a short comic by Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot, "From Homogenous To Honey", about the infamous anti-LGBT Clause 28 introduced by the Conservative government in 1988. Geoff Ryman's "Oh Happy Day!" looks at a particularly grim dystopia where the gender boot is on the other foot. "Civilisation" by Vylar Kaftan takes the choose-your-own-adventure format and applies it to dystopias. Generally a good collection. ( )
Shirley Jackson, best known for penning this classic story, was the author of several novels, such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, the latter of which has been adapted to film twice (both times as The Haunting).
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and, of course, the book this anthology is named for--Brave New World--are the cornerstones of dystopian literature in novel form, but there has never, to my knowledge, been an anthology containing all the best, classic works of dystopian short fiction in one volume. (from the Introduction)
The book "Selections from Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories" is a subset of the book "Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories". Please do not combine these two volumes.
The expanded second edition adds three stories by Robert Reed, Jennifer Pelland, and Ken Liu, plus a filmography and study guide by Gary K. Wolfe.
Furthermore, the second edition e-book is missing the stories by Ballard, Bradbury, Dick, and Vonnegut.
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▾Book descriptions
You are being watched. Your every movement is being tracked, your every word recorded. Your spouse may be an informer, your children may be listening at your door, your best friend may be a member of the secret police. You are alone among thousands, among great crowds of the brainwashed, the well-behaved, the loyal. Productivity has never been higher, the media blares, and the army is ever triumphant. One wrong move, one slip-up, and you may find yourself disappeared -- swallowed up by a monstrous bureaucracy, vanished into a shadowy labyrinth of interrogation chambers, show trials, and secret prisons from which no one ever escapes. Welcome to the world of the dystopia, a world of government and society gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong. What happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life? From 1984 to The Handmaid's Tale, from Children of Men to Bioshock, the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force. Brave New Worlds collects the best tales of totalitarian menace by some of today's most visionary writers, including Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Orson Scott Card, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny? Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
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Book description
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny?
In his smash-hit anthologies Wastelands and The Living Dead, acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams showed you what happens when society is utterly wiped away. Now he brings you a glimpse into an equally terrifying future — what happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life?
From 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale, from Children of Men to Bioshock, the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force. Brave New Worlds collects twenty-eight of the best tales of dystopian menace by some of today’s most visionary writers.
Anthology contains:
Introduction / John Joseph Adams
The Lottery / Shirley Jackson
Red Card / S.L. Gilbow
Ten with a Flag / Joseph Paul Haines
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin
Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment / M. Rickert
The Funeral / Kate Wilhelm
O Happy Day! / Geoff Ryman
Pervert / Charles Coleman Finlay
From Homogenous to Honey / Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot
Billennium / J.G. Ballard
Amaryllis / Carrie Vaughn
Pop Squad / Paolo Bacigalupi
Auspicious Eggs / James Morrow
Peter Skilling / Alex Irvine
The Pedestrian / Ray Bradbury
The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away / Cory Doctorow
The Pearl Diver / Caitlin R. Kiernan
Dead Space for the Unexpected / Geoff Ryman
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman / Harlan Ellison
Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution? / Genevieve Valentine
Independence Day / Sarah Langan
The Lunatics / Kim Stanley Robinson
Sacrament / Matt Williamson
The Minority Report / Philip K. Dick
Just Do It / Heather Lindsley
Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Caught in the Organ Draft / Robert Silverberg
Geriatric Ward / Orson Scott Card
Arties Aren't Stupid / Jeremiah Tolbert
Jordan's Waterhammer / Joe Mastroianni
Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs / Adam-Troy Castro
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