50 Book Challenge Part Five

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2017, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it's not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third thread here and the fourth one here.

What are you reading?

A lovely book!

See? I'm not such a loon as I'm feathered-looking.

Cheerful have added to my wish list too but to be honest it is growing with a mind of its own. Short of being bedridden for a year I can't see how I will get through it!

27. Can you forgive her? Trollope (audiobook). Well, I'm still enjoying the mellifluous tones of Timothy West as I move into the Parliamentary novels. I'm finding the 19th century prose a pleasing foil to the contemporary fiction I tend to read, though feeling very 21st-centurily frustrated over the whole 'sinning against womankind' bollocks.
28. Do not way we have nothing: Madeleine Thien. Enjoyed this. Found the modern first person parts less convincing than the historic family narrative, particularly what I felt was a rather contrived way of using maths versus music as a way of interpreting the world. Very interesting about a period that I know little about too. A little unsatisfying at the end. Suffered from reading this on a Kindle as at the beginning when all the characters are being introduced I would have liked to have been able to flick back and forth more easily.

"I'm not such a loon as I'm feathered-looking"

You what? Are you high or am I?

Cote. Um. It's quite a complicated joke. There's an English phrase "I'm not so green as I'm cabbage-looking", which is a play on 'green' meaning naive and green meaning, well, cabbage-colour.

'Loon' is slang for crazy (from lunatic) and it's also a type of bird. So it's a pun on the phrase and the bird. Suggesting I'm not as crazy as I look for saying Best Farrar is a lovely story despite the multiple attempted murders, because Tanaqui(?) agrees with me.

I've just read three Saki stories before breakfast. He's rubbing off.

Good to hear that neither of us are high I know 'loon' but it was the 'feathered-looking' that got me a bit worried.

Alas, not at this time in the morning.

Cote
Yes, dystopian fiction is a sub-genre of SF. I was thinking of Speculative Fiction when I wrote that abbreviation, but since there are very few books that are arguable Spec-fi but not Sci-fi (like J G Ballard's Vermillion Sands. I can't think of another book)

I had assumed you meant Sci-Fi rather than Speculative Fiction - the latter makes sense. I can think of a few dystopian novels where possible Sci-Fi elements are too minor in relation to other elements of the book to warrant a Sci-Fi categorization (Animal Farm, for example).

Me neither, Cheerful but... you know... flashback

Fascicle - Animal Farm is an allegorical story about the events leading up to the Soviet Revolution IIRC so not dystopian fiction at all. Surely nobody thinks of it as a dystopian future?

I've been holding back from this debate, but must interject at this point. Dystopian fiction does not necessarily mean it is set in the future. Dystopia is the opposite of utopia - an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one (OED). From that definition then, allegorical or not, Animal Farm would seem to be set in a dystopian society.

If we're thinking about dystopian fiction by George Orwell, 1984 fits the dystopian label much better than Animal Farm does.

Or if Animal Farm is a dystopian society, it's a historical one rather than a sci-fi one.

Something can be both allegorical and dystopian, surely?

Why hold back?

Utopian and Dystopian fiction are not about parts of human history where people's lives were spectacularly pleasant or spectacularly unpleasant. You don't call a book about Jews in WWII Dystopian fiction.

These sub-genres are about "imagined" societies and are hence under Speculative Fiction. The vast majority will specifically be under Science-Fiction (which is under Speculative Fiction) - 1984, Brave New World, Hunger Games, The Island, Never Let Me Go, etc.

I might if the Nazis were portrayed as pigs who could learn to walk and talk.

Animal Farm isn't about a dystopian society though. It's about Russia becoming Soviet Union, told allegorically. It's a fable, if anything.

And holding back because I don't have the head space for argument and point scoring - we will never agree on this issue.

Also, in fairness, I know that I am guilty of bias on this issue. In science fiction and dystopian fiction I do not in the least care if laws of science are broken, bent or ignored. But I cannot bear historical fiction to take the same liberties. The past is fact (or interpretation of fact). An event either happened or didn't happen. I am a mass of contradictions.

Why do you classify 1984 as Science Fiction?

"Something can be both allegorical and dystopian, surely?"

No doubt, but it would not be the allegory of a past event.

By definition, Dystopian fiction is about an imagined social order. Nearly always about the future (as a cautionary tale) but there are a few examples of fantasy dystopias. Still under the Speculative Fiction umbrella, of course.

Yes the dystopian landscape of Animal Farm is clearly meant to reflect real events, it is still an imagined land though.

"Why do you classify 1984 as Science Fiction?"

I don't classify it. 1984 is sci-fi - one of its best known, most clearly sci-fi examples, in fact.

It takes place in the future (titled 1984, when written in 1949) and talks about constant surveillance with "telescreens" which was a yet-unseen technology that enabled the dystopia in 1984. QED.

It's an animal farm, not an imagined land. With talking animals. At best you can say (maybe) that it's Fantasy (and not even, since real events, told allegorically) but definitely not Dystopian.

Look up the definition of Dystopian fiction, if you don't believe me.

I just wrote out the OED definition of dystopia thank you. You think that a farm where animals talk is not imagined?