'An excellent roundup of high-class writing talent, all offering their interpretations of dystopian possibilities that should stick with the reader long after they finish the last story.' Most of the stories are bleak, many are hopeless, and all serve as powerful warnings of what we may let ourselves become.' -Publishers Weekly (starred review) Ballard rub shoulders with new standouts in this dark anthology of 33 dystopian futures and alternate worlds. Review'Familiar classics by such luminaries as Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. Grinding inevitability runs through Vylar Kaftan's interactive 'Civilization.' Most of the stories are bleak, many are hopeless, and all serve as powerful warnings of what we may let ourselves become. Matt Williamson's 'Sacrament' offers the torturer's perspective on his 'art.' Adam-Troy Castro's 'Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs' asks how much of our souls we would surrender for nine days of guaranteed happiness plus one of horror. Sarah Langan's 'Independence Day' shows a tyrannical future U.S. In Joseph Paul Haines's 'Ten with a Flag,' a government uses confusion to manipulate the governed. Familiar classics by such luminaries as Shirley Jackson, Ursula K.

Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny?įrom Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state.

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. 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.

Welcome to the world of the dystopia, a world of government and society gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong. 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. Productivity has never been higher, the media blares, and the army is ever triumphant. You are alone among thousands, among great crowds of the brainwashed, the well-behaved, the loyal. 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. Your every movement is being tracked, your every word recorded.

Brave New Worlds by John Joseph Adams