#dystopianscifi

The Trench Digger 7: An Ode to Brutalist DecaynnThe abyssal plain represents humanity’s ultimate frontier for resource extraction. Yet, this dark domain is not governed by pristine, automated machines, but by the forgotten, rusting relics of long-past corporate excess. Our focus today is the Trench Digger 7, a deep-sea mining submersible that stands as a stark monument to extreme grunge and…

Divergent

Society is divided into five personality-based factions to keep the peace. But when a teenage girl doesn’t fit into just one — and turns out to be Divergent — she becomes a threat to the system. Cue revolution, dystopian haircuts, and very intense zipline metaphors.

Soylent Green

In an overpopulated, climate-wrecked future, a cop investigates a corporate murder — only to uncover the horrifying truth behind the world’s most popular food product. It’s grimy, sweaty, and disturbingly prescient.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Form: physical copy, edition 1993

Pages: 223

Approx reading time: 6 hours - lots of pauses to reflect and take in passages

A trippy poetic dream, a finding and loss of self, to exist in between. A metaphor for the psyche’s inability to choose anything other than what it has been made to believe. The incomprehensibility of believing in anything that has not been thought of before or mandated by the benefactor. I’ll remember this book fondly. What a tragic world without imagination all succumbed to abide by the Machine. It actually draws out themes and a world similar to a story I’m working on right now. The protagonist is one part aggravating and intoxicatingly juvenile in spite of having 32 years under his belt, and the other part endearing, a child learning what can be possible.