DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 1953. I listened to the Tantor Media audio version published in 2010. Read by Stephen Hoye Duration: Approximately 5.5 hours Unabridged Synopsis:  Guy Montag is a fireman in a future United States. Firemen in the future do not fight fires. Instead, they burn books, newspapers, magazines that people have hidden away. If you hide forbidden media in your home your home will be burned to make sure all of the books are gone and to serve as a warning to rest of the neighborhood.  Montag is great at his job, but he has his doubts. Every once in a while he takes a book home. He hides them in the ventilation system of the house. No one knows, not even his wife. Those doubts are accelerated when his team witness a woman die in the fire with her books rather than live without them... My review:  This book has an interesting history. Bradbury started building the world that this book is set in with some short stories of a dystopian future where everyone...

  Published in October of 2023 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Laura Jennings. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Set in a future dystopian Arizona in a United States that is collapsing due to pollution and climate change. 19 year old Georgia lives with her father and her 16 year old brother in an outpost in the Arizona desert north of Phoenix. They are hiding away from the polluted city of Phoenix and the few people that bother to venture out into the wilderness.  When Georgia and her brother encounter two "hikers" and their car near their outpost, everything changes... My review: This book starts out very interesting and then settles into a moody story about relationships, betrayals, and discovery - but I made it sound way more interesting than it actually was. In reality, it was an interesting 45 minute set-up at the beginning and multiple hints that something really dramatic could happen and then nothing happened - again and again and again. ****Spoiler Ale...

  Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bronson Pinchot Duration: 8 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: A Colorado police chief named Colton has organized a search for a young girl he suspects has been abducted. He reaches out to the best tracker he knows, Sam "Raven" Spears, for help. Raven is part Sioux and part Cherokee - an important fact because he soon suspects that the abductor is acting out a Cherokee legend featuring cannibals.  While Colton and Raven are on the hunt, there is a North Korean EMP attack on the United States. For those not aware, EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. Nuclear weapons emit a pulse that absolutely fries most electronics. If you bomb a city normally, the pulse is limited by hills, buildings, and lots of other things. But, if you blow a nuclear bomb up high up in the air, the bomb doesn't do a lot of damage but the EMP kills all exposed modern cars (older cars have no computer systems, electrical systems, power plants...

  Published in 2020 by Listening Library. Read by Kathleen McInerney. Duration: 8 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The DC ICONS series tells alternate origin stories for DC superheroes, focusing on them in their high school years. This is the fourth in this YA series that I have listened to as an audiobook. My previous ones were the "big three" of the DC Comics Universe - Superman , Batman , and Wonder Woman . This time I listened to an often overlooked character, Black Canary.  To be clear, this book focuses on Dinah Lance, the daughter of the original Black Canary. Black Canary was talented at martial arts but her main power was the ability to use her singing voice as a weapon. The book is set in a dystopian future Gotham City. Think Gotham City meets The Handmaid's Tale . It is a generation after Batman and Commissioner Gordon have passed away.  Based on a single comment from one of the characters, women's rights have been rolled back across the country. Th...

Originally published in 1952. Synopsis: Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War.  That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.) In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die.  The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) in 1952 This is the source of the title, Player Piano . A player piano plays itself than...

  Originally published in 1982. Originally published in completed form in 1988 by DC Vertigo. This iconic graphic novel has been on my to-be-read list for a long while. I tried watching the movie, but it had been a long week and I soon fell asleep. I assumed that the movie missed some of the pizazz of the graphic novel. I decided to go ahead and read the book when I noticed it was on t he list of some 850 books that a Republican Texas state legislator wanted to ban from all Texas schools.  V for VENDETTA is the story of a masked vigilante who decides to stand up against the fascist government of an alternative history version of the United Kingdom. The masked character has become the single most recognizable feature of the book and the face of the "anonymous" movement that swept over social media a few years ago. Many people assume that it was put on the censorship list because it features a character that fights back against a repressive government. They assume that Texas ...

  Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Anne-Marie Gaillard, Duration: 5 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Set in a dystopian future in Ireland, Last Ones Left Alive is the story of Orpen, a teenage girl. The world is overrun by "skrakes". The reader is never exactly told what skrakes are, but it is useful to just think of them as a sort of zombie. Skrakes hunt humans and when a human is bitten by a skrake, the human gets an infection and becomes a skrake.  Orpen grew up on an island off of the coast of Ireland. There are three of them - Orpen, her mother and another woman named Maeve, The skrakes never come to the island, but from time to time her mother and Maeve must leave the island to scrounge for supplies and hunt. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present and flashbacks to Orpen's childhood. There  are hints as to what Maeve and her mother did before they came to the island. It is clear is that they have extraordinary hand-to-hand comba...

  Published in 1988 by Recorded Books. Paper book originally published in 1985. Read by Betty Harris. Duration: 11 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Note: A newer audiobook version read by Clair Danes was published in 2012. I am very late to The Handmaid's Tale - more than 35 years after the original publication date.  The plot is fairly well known so I am not going to go into extreme details. The story is set in a dystopian future America after a violent coup took out the Congress and the Executive Branch. Pollution and constant warfare have lowered the birth rate to an alarmingly low rate and the upper classes have instituted a religion-based system of surrogate motherhood. The upper classes were inspired by the Biblical story of Jacob and Rachel  from the book of Genesis and how Rachel resolved the fact that she was unable to have children by having her handmaid sleep with Jacob and Rachel would keep any children as her own. The red robes and the white headpiece are the o...

  Published in 2020 by Tantor Audio. Read by Romy Nordlinger Duration: 3 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. A 2021 Hugo Award Finalist A 2021 Locus Award Finalist A 2020 ALA Booklist Top 10 SF/F Pick A  Booklist  Editor's Choice Pick Book Riot's  Best Books of 2020 So Far Named a Best of 2020 Pick for  NPR  |  NYPL  |  Booklist  |  Bustle | Den of Geek I have a weakness for dystopian literature. I don't do too much of it because so much of it is repetitive - usually it is World War III caused by a nuclear or bio-warfare attack by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, or the Americans. But, I do enjoy seeing where the author thinks we will break down and how we might recover and rebuild. Upright Women Wanted fit the bill - a future world in which the western United States has devolved back into a Wild West environment ruled by iron-fisted sheriffs that enforce a strict moral code. Their rules include a death penalt...

  Published in 2017 by HarperAudio. Read by Eva Kaminsky. Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States.  Sort of. In Sea of Rust , the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp.  Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence.  The author, C. Robert Cargill As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violen...

Published by Kobo Originals in 2018. Read by Meegwun Fairweather. Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. It is the latter half of the 21st century and the world has had a series of literal upheavals. Earthquakes sheared off California, global warming has changed the weather. Droughts occur in former wet spaces and dry places have become swamps. Sea levels have risen and drowned out many cities. Many animal species have died off and others are in severe decline. On top of that, the nations of the world have gone to war and most cities were destroyed, people have fled to the remaining cities. The entire world map has been re-drawn. In the future there is also another problem. Almost everyone in the world has The author, Cherie Dimaline. lost the ability to dream. Everybody except the indigenous population of the Americas - Native Americans. However, their bone marrow can be harvested for a substance that lets other people dream. The government and the Catholic Church have joine...

Originally published in 1982. Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Kevin Kenerly. Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule of thumb - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that rule would be problematic. This edition of The Running Man includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name. The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy. The economy is ruled by a company called Genera...

Published by Peter Besson, Inc. in 2018. Read by Conner Goff Duration: 7 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. In the near future the population of the world has reached the breaking point and climate change has made it all the harder to feed everyone. Throw in a near-continuous state of war and a collapsing economy and you might understand why some people would want to go and kill themselves before someone else gets around to doing it. So many people were killing themselves that a niche industry formed - suicide hotels designed to deal specifically with the needs of those that want to kill themselves. They are called "Last Resorts" and have any number of conveniences for those that are determined to "check out" of this life, such as handguns, poisons, drugs for overdosing and convenient places to throw oneself off of the roof without harming passersby. The only real rule is that once you check in, you cannot check out alive. You can stay as long as you'd like,...

Published by T.A. Ward Books in May of 2018. Read by Tom Askin. Duration: 8 hours, 41 minutes. Unabridged. In this science fiction novel, the United States suffered a horrible day of terrorist attacks known as the Day of Destruction in the 2040's. There were nuclear attacks in some places but Philadelphia was attacked by a nerve gas called Obcasus. The gas itself was bad enough, but the side effects are worse. Women who were exposed give birth to children with brain damage that makes them uncontrollably violent - even as infants. They are called inexorables. Our main character is Dr. Ethan King, a Philadelphia infectious disease doctor that has treated patients for Obcasus exposure since the Day of Destruction. He is happily married but he and his wife cannot have children. One day, Dr. King spots a starving, nearly dead Inexorable child as he is leaving the hospital late at night and he decides to take it home... The premise behind this book was very strong. However, I ...

P ublished in 2017 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon. Duration: 9 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged The action surrounding embattled water engineer Nathan Fisher and his family in the year 2035 continues in Rogue State , the second book in this series . In the first book, Nathan witnessed an act of terrorism designed to egg on a tense situation between the government of California and the federal government. Now, he and his family are being hunted by a mysterious group funded by a group of oligarchs that are determined to manipulate this situation to their advantage. In the second book of this series the action factor gets ratcheted way up. In many ways, the main story line of the book is one giant chase scene across a series of rural and urban desert landscapes - but it is a heck of a chase scene. We also learn a lot more about the bad guys and the messed up version of America that Konkoly has created for this book (which I found at least as interesting as the chase s...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2016 Read by Timothy Andres Pabon Duration: 10 hours, 9 minutes Unabridged In the year 2035 America is almost unrecognizable. Environmental collapse due the abuse of aquifers and mountain run-off in the West has caused the governments of many Western states to practically collapse. The highway systems have become "No Man's Land" and the Arizona border has practically been overrun by drug cartels who often act as a brutal de facto government in some areas. California has escaped this fate due to a strict resource protection regimen that limits travel, and strictly watches how much water and electricity each household consumes. The relationship between the strict (yet successful) government of California and the often ineffectual federal government is strained to the point that there is an open and active movement that is pushing for California to secede. Political assassinations and the sabotaging of a critical power plant make the pol...

Adapted from a French novel written in 1957 by Stefan Wul Published in February of 2018 by Dark Horse Originals. Set in the future, the Earth's ecosystem has been severely damaged by mankind. Very few people have survived the collapse of civilization and those that have live in a Stone Age society. A shunned member of a tribal band acts out of desperate need to be accepted by the only group of humans he knows. Known as The Dark Child, he accidentally discovers some of the truth as to what happened and leads his people towards the ruined city of Niourk (New York) in search of better hunting. This is a long trip considering that they started in the dried out basin of what used to be the Caribbean Sea. Along the way, he discovers more and more of the truth and soon becomes something more than he ever could have imagined... Niourk is a beautifully illustrated book. The story itself has three main plot lines that show promise. Sadly, none of them are followed through with and th...

Originally published in 1985. Winner of the Locus Award in 1986. The Postman is the book that inspired the Kevin Costner movie of the same name. It has a lot of similar features but the movie changed a great deal. Gordon Krantz is a survivor of the Doomwar, a nuclear and biological war between all of the world powers. The war was bad enough but survivalist groups called the Holnists made survival even more miserable in what was left behind. The Holnists are united by a common ideology that teaches that some men are naturally superior to others and every man must grab what he can get in this world. Krantz is slowly working his way across the country. He started out in Minnesota and 15 years later he has made it to Oregon. He has to walk because the nuclear pulse wiped out the electronics. Life is tough everywhere, but in most places it resembles the Mad Max movies more than anything else so it is slow going. Krantz loses everything to a group of thieves and luckily stumbles upon a...