Brave new worlds

Early on when I was reading this collection I found I had to put it down because of the sheer weight of all the visions of human misery. Dystopias can be depressing! Who could have guessed. After a while, though, the sheer variety of dystopic invention would continue to provide excuses to keep pressing on, as if I were a tourist among places which were each beset with their own private version of Hell, but able to move on in fifteen pages or so. Some of the characters are crushed by the oppression and some are able to defeat it, and some are completely unaware that they have any choice in the matter. All of them have something to say to the sensitive citizen in Western society.

John Joseph Adams is a stickler for the proper use of terminology, carefully separating true dystopia stories which all have more-or-less intact governing structures from post-apocalyptic tales such as the ones in his other collections which speak to a very different set of preoccupations for modern people. He calls this out in his Introduction here. Few post-apocalyptic tales show those in charge attempting to paint their societies as utopias, for instance, as the Adam-Troy Castro story in this volume does. The great majority of the stories collected here are reprints, but with the current trend toward dystopia in Young Adult fiction, I think a second volume could be put together without undue fuss.

Worth a five-star rating just by including Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Carrie Vaughn's The Amaryllis.