Quizzes & Puzzles0 min ago
Would You Read This Book/ Is It Too Much Like Any Other Dystopian Fiction You Know?
7 Answers
In the SUA (Secure Union of America) emotions are considered dangerous by the government and are called hysteria, so everybody undergoes an "operation" at age 16 to numb the amygdala to render it incompetent of generating authentic emotions. Afterwards the people receive Syntheses which are injections of synthetic emotion, but only specific feelings and variations of emotions which are government-approved and "safe". The SUA has 61 sectors, which are not border-to-border but scattered across the country, often clustered around big cities, are surrounded by border fences and connected with train tunnels. The land between them is considered dangerous and is called the Wastelands. Venturing past the fences into the Wastelands is punishable by death. The book centres on Lauren Polaris, a girl who is scheduled to get her "operation", but it doesn't work on her. This phenomenon is called nemosiny, where the emotions of a person are too strong to be suppressed by the lethe (the name of the operation). If anybody were to find out about Lauren's nemosiny she would be executed immediately, so she flees into the Wastelands, but what she doesn't know is that the government is searching for her, because every time that one hundred nemosines are alive simultaneously, the government organises the "Endgame" which is where all nemosines are entered into a labyrinth full of malicious traps and treacherous, unseen, disguised dangers. All they have to do is survive - something nobody has ever succeeded in.
What do you think?
What do you think?
Answers
sounds slightly like Brave New World with a bit of THX1138 and more than a bit of Hunger Games - but what the heck, any writer has the right to take a set up and make it his own. If your own narrative and ideas are good enough, readers will soon forget the ones that inspired you. If they aren't everyone will point it out.
19:01 Tue 07th Jul 2015
sounds slightly like Brave New World with a bit of THX1138 and more than a bit of Hunger Games - but what the heck, any writer has the right to take a set up and make it his own. If your own narrative and ideas are good enough, readers will soon forget the ones that inspired you. If they aren't everyone will point it out.
@ottom
I would be far more interested in the process by which America, of all places, would allow itself to descend into totalitarianism, in the first place. A people who don't want their government taking their guns away certainly won't submit to having state-imposed brain surgery done on them and especially not on their children.
Unless you want it to be an allegory on the legalisation of marijuana? That would be fun (in fact it's a fine line between political satire and out-and-out Woody Allen-ism). (:oO
Plot-hole-wise: if the wastelands are so dangerous, why are escapees executed? Why not just let the dangerousness kill them?
Or is the dangerousness a fable and the elites don't want the city's workforce trampling their countryside paradise?
For instance, how do these cities feed themselves? How many acres of "not-wasteland" are required to feed a city of (say) 2 million people?
I'm only mentioning that if you want to detail your fictional cities with a buffer zone (inside the fences) of viable farmland. In practice, it may be better to leave that for your readers to figure out. Plot holes add to the entertainment value and give the fanbase something to chat about.
I would be far more interested in the process by which America, of all places, would allow itself to descend into totalitarianism, in the first place. A people who don't want their government taking their guns away certainly won't submit to having state-imposed brain surgery done on them and especially not on their children.
Unless you want it to be an allegory on the legalisation of marijuana? That would be fun (in fact it's a fine line between political satire and out-and-out Woody Allen-ism). (:oO
Plot-hole-wise: if the wastelands are so dangerous, why are escapees executed? Why not just let the dangerousness kill them?
Or is the dangerousness a fable and the elites don't want the city's workforce trampling their countryside paradise?
For instance, how do these cities feed themselves? How many acres of "not-wasteland" are required to feed a city of (say) 2 million people?
I'm only mentioning that if you want to detail your fictional cities with a buffer zone (inside the fences) of viable farmland. In practice, it may be better to leave that for your readers to figure out. Plot holes add to the entertainment value and give the fanbase something to chat about.
@Clanad
I'm puzzled as to why American fiction is so obsessive about emotions, what with Spock/Data/Tuvok type characters, exploring what it is to either lack them or, as Data was able to do, have selected emotions programmed in.
McGuffin isn't the right word for this (I believe that to be something central to the plot, not a pace-modifying side-issue) but the idea seems to be to simultaneously express the thought that human emotions are some kind of obstacle to intellectual achievement and something that the human characters use to best effect, arriving at solutions which the de-emotionalised characters would either overlook as a possibility or dismiss out of hand. Thus the whole subject is explored, for our edification.
I'm puzzled as to why American fiction is so obsessive about emotions, what with Spock/Data/Tuvok type characters, exploring what it is to either lack them or, as Data was able to do, have selected emotions programmed in.
McGuffin isn't the right word for this (I believe that to be something central to the plot, not a pace-modifying side-issue) but the idea seems to be to simultaneously express the thought that human emotions are some kind of obstacle to intellectual achievement and something that the human characters use to best effect, arriving at solutions which the de-emotionalised characters would either overlook as a possibility or dismiss out of hand. Thus the whole subject is explored, for our edification.
Related Questions
Sorry, we can't find any related questions. Try using the search bar at the top of the page to search for some keywords, or choose a topic and submit your own question.