A Comparison of Two Dystopian Novels

Today I was reading someone’s criticism of the modern-day dystopian novel genre, about how many dystopian novels (especially in the Young Adult (YA) subgenre, represented by books like the Hunger Games and Divergent (the first praised by the author for its real criticism and understanding of the subject matter it was critiquing, while the second was the focus of their criticism)) seemed to almost follow a formula and how many seemed strangely made for the screen, having somewhat confused themselves with enticing storylines of adventure and drama that are so easily transferred to the silver screen, happily marketable, able to “criticise” the ills of the world—and particularly, capitalism—while being a bit too comfortably promoted by capitalistic ventures.
And it got me thinking. The very first thing it had me thinking was this exact phrase: “Is the future of dystopian novels dystopian?”

Second, it got me thinking about books that I had read in the genre (being a Muse fan, dystopia is mildly on my radar I would say), and I realised that I’ve never, ever thought of a book like 1984 and a book like Ready Player One to be of the same genre, even though they both technically would present themselves as dystopian novels. One is meant to give you a rush of thrill and make you go, “whoa, cool!” and basically make you want to live in what the author will otherwise take the pains to say is a world you don’t want to be living in. (Please bear with me while I stack the two books side by side… as ridiculous as that may sound to some of you!)

Both are books set in the near future. 1984, written in 1949 and set in the titular 1984; Ready Player One, written in 2011 (I had to google that and it surprised me… I thought it’d be written around 2015. Ernest Cline was early to the 80s nostalgia trend!), set in 2045. Both imagine some forms of technology that didn’t exist at the time (or wasn’t overtly used in the manner that the book shows)—in Ready Player One, it’s VR technology, in 1984 it’s mostly surveillance technology. 

But the difference is in how these new technologies are used—Orwell makes the most mundane use of ordinary technology: two-way screens, mics, tubes, whatnot. As small as these might be, they were in a way physical manifestations of what was wrong. (Why? Because they existed in some form already, and that’s not how we saw them being used.) We had TV screens, mics had been invented, pneumatic tubes? Heard of them. But we weren’t used to seeing them used like this: these (relatively) ubiquitous things we considered harmless, screens watching us instead of us watching them, mics listening to us, pneumatic tubes destroying the undeniable truth as we knew it—as much as it was just a build up for the idea of people controlling us, of people listening, watching, denying, the technology was an important symbol representing and amplifying the book’s ideas. It was chilling. It’s what made the contrasting notebook of paper and ink seem so… free. Rebellious. Because in a world where the ordinary seems to have turned against you, it was the ordinary that also came to the rescue. Now what does Ready Player One do with its props?

The setting is futuristic as you’d see futuristic from a 2010s view. It’s VR, internet, fantasy, it sounds like a good world. (One thing though, yes we’ve seen VR headsets, but they’re not as ubiquitous, are they? It doesn’t chill you the way the items used in 1984 do, because we don’t yet see them as harmless everyday objects. It’s a bit unrelatable, so it’s not as effective. It comes off as more fantastical.) Yes, Cline is using the too-good-to-be-true contrast here: inside the Oasis, it’s wonderful! It’s fulfilling! You have friends, money, hope, luxury, life! Step outside though, and for most people it’s trailers stacked on top of each other, it’s poverty, theft, arson even. But you don’t live in that world very often do you? Read the book, and you’re always in the Oasis. Cline (in my opinion) got a bit carried away with the 80s nostalgia. Corporate henchmen blinded by greed and advertising options, which is probably the realest part of the whole book (and might I add, corporate henchmen who remind me of Pokémon’s Team Plasma) in the most glamorous version of the world? Can’t shake me that much, I’m too busy wondering how the heck that boy can game for 23 hours without his head swimming. Just writing this post is making me think I should get up and stretch now or something. 

Ready Player One focuses less on the chilling, more on the thrilling. I mean, it could’ve done a lot better given the time it was written was around when we were beginning to have our net neutrality battles, but it never got around to showing us any consequences. Too much threat of “don’t you dare” and no realisation in anyway of what could go wrong and why we should hate it. The worst the book did was have a gun-slinging action chase scene. He could have shown a world without net neutrality beyond just the money-muscle-flexing of “we bought better VR headsets”, it was a real threat to many people and could have struck a stronger chord. To me, Cline got carried away and mixed up his messages. It ended up becoming more about self-acceptance towards the end, and focussed a lot on the “weren’t the 80s a party, I wish I were around in the 1980s”. 

Bottom line, the big difference between 1984 and Ready Player One, two novels that bill themselves as dystopian future novels? One chills, the other thrills.

What do you think? On the one hand, perhaps it’s only a product of changing times. Maybe people reading 1984 in the ’50s could have thought it quite odd that everyone might have a TV screen, and that it could watch you—novel! Perhaps VR today stands at the same place, chronistically (is that a word? The opposite of anachronistically?), as a television screen would have stood in the 1950s—about three decades after its invention. To me however, Ready Player One missing its mark has less to do with the technological premises it employs, but the fact that it employs them too much. Cline spends so much time in the VR world, he doesn’t actually address the “real” world’s circumstances beyond “this boy lives in a stacked up trailer and comes from a dysfunctional family”. He gets too caught up in 80s nostalgia, and makes more threats than actually show why the evil-guy corporation’s implementation of this freemium model is a bad idea. This book was written around the time our conversations about net neutrality were popping up, so the book could have done much more. Ultimately, it’s more about nostalgic comfort (reinforced by the fact that the future is “bad”), more about thrill than chill, as a dystopian novel should leave you feeling.

But let me know what you think in the comments! (Or don’t, you’ve probably spent a while reading this. Treat yourself to a glass of water. Or an ice-cream bar. It’s summer, folks!)

So, Did E-Books Grow Up To Be Real Boys?

As a kid who learned the word “voracious” in one and only one context, I’ve read a lot. Most of my life, it was physical, paper books, and I could swear by those. The feel of the pages, the flipping sound, the smell of a new book, or the smell of an old one! Reading and feeling embossed book covers, the inside sleeve with a note about the author, their other books and maybe a sneak preview of their next one?! Physical books could do no wrong in my eyes (and still can’t). Reading almost never only happened in one single context though, so newspapers, textbooks, magazines, comic books, all added their unique experiences to the I-Love-Paper-Books reasons collective.

Many people’s idea of a good day

Newspapers, with articles that could be cut out if or when everyone else had finished reading them (and the ensuing involved race to get the paper in that slim period between when everyone who wanted to read it was done, and the paper being gone…), magazines with news about your favourite bands and enough well-written allure in them to help you find the next set of favourites; comic books, first friends in mirth, later instructors in how to draw yourself, the most patient of all teachers, oh and textbooks with weird notes and doodles, also being physical entities you could slam down without having a heart attack at the end of the day.

Yes but I’d probably hate you if you did this because I’d spend all day ironing out the creases

Clearly, I can slip into the book-romanticising crowd, and blend in well with their moans of the perils of modern day technology. But as a student, having the space restrictions and the frequent travelling that comes with it, e-books have become quite hard to avoid. I’ve had a Kindle for a while now, and I think I’ve used it for long enough to be able to reflect on whether I like it much as a concept or not.

(Concept and implementation are far from the same. So many things that start out well-done often get degraded during a second release or an update I’m finding, and my guess is that’s to give companies something to call an improvement on the next iteration. For example, I have one of the Kindles that came out a couple of years ago, and before that, had a slightly older model, both belonging to the same e-ink line of hardware models (Paperwhites, I’m sure). I While my newer one had a slightly newer style of screen, I noticed that in addition to the screen not being a separate part of the device (with a ridge between the part that’s the screen and the rest of the body), but with a single plastic glass just covering the entire face of the device. I did notice that owing to this, the screen of the Kindle did seem whiter than the previous, which seemed a much more book-natural cream colour. It wasn’t too much of an issue, and being a younger person quite raised on the Internet and used to reading on a screen for other purposes, it didn’t make much of a difference to me until I compared it, and ultimately, I just enjoyed not having to read on my phone. But I can imagine if you were less used to it, the switch from the old Kindle to the newer one may have clashed somewhat with your taste. I put it down to either bad/overlooked design, or some unfortunate practicality in hardware development that I wouldn’t have thought about, and didn’t imagine anyone else had thought too deeply about it.

Fast-forward to me finding out about the new Kindle Oasis last year; it’s got a new, innovative and exciting feature: Yellow Mode™! Introducing the all-new Kindle Oasis, with Yellow Mode ™ technology– it feels just like a real book! It’s yellower, cream hues are more natural and welcoming to readers who prefer physical books, allowing you to stop thinking too much about the specifics of the device, and to just get lost in the absorbing world of a book, just the way you used to when you were a kid with a physical book, before we decided to get rid of those 🙂
Amazon Kindle’s Oasis: It Grew Up To Be A Real Book!

Except, shock and horror—this feature already existed! I can’t believe they simply tried to turn it off for one generation and bring it back pretending they’d invented the wheel… someone’s having trouble keeping with Moore’s law! Anyway, I massively digress.)

Good things about e-readers:

• Unlike what I had originally thought them to be, e-readers are not really iPads. I mean, they can be if you want them to be, but the whole point of most e-readers is that they’re book devices, and many favour non-LCD/backlit displays which means I’m not guilty of doing my eyes 10x damage reading them. If only I’d have known that, I’d have run through more Kindles and not had a telephone till I left for university. I spent all my phone time reading articles from the NME anyway.
• That’s another good thing about e-readers, you can use the internet with many of them as well. You do have to have infinite patience with them though, and another dose of infinite patience when trying to explain to someone why on Earth you’d ever want to use those when the slowest of phones could pull an impressive performance over these things.
• I travel. I have luggage restraints. In first year, I had about half a bag in books I thought I might want to read on the FLIGHT. It’s insane. Now I just prefer popping them all on one device and then making up my mind later (not very different from what I used to do earlier but at least I don’t look like an idiot trying!)
• Textbooks: 1. They very big. 2. Show two fingers to (*sniffs up*) Big Publishing by not buying your $200 + tax textbooks a course; get them online and then send their authors an email with the subject “:)” because they don’t really get paid much for their textbooks and research articles to get published. Many say they prefer you just email them asking them for access and they’ll email their papers to you directly, but I don’t read as many research papers so I digress here. You’re already paying a lot for your education, I guess, so why not.
• Eye-strain-wise, it’s also super useful for when you’re putting in long hours studying or whatever. You’d NEED to take a break, far sooner, with a laptop. But yeah, breaks are for everyone eventually!
• I send far too many websites to myself to read on my Kindle and then forget to delete them, but that’s okay.
• You can send your own documents as well. These days, I tend to write up the songs for and general flow of my radio show on a document and then just read it from my Kindle. It’s far more convenient than switching from the audio recording tab to the music playlists to the article I read on them and then to Bandcamp… I just write it out like I were new to radio. We’ll go “spontaneous” once I’m live again. (I can still have my show flow out on the Kindle though!)
• I have hopped from textbook to an article on Mogwai to Peter Hook’s book in a single sitting. Can’t do that with regular books!
• You can read in the dark! The Kindle now, stupendously enough, has dark mode?! I guess it’s for the night hours more than for anything traditional laptops and phones have them for, but also, don’t do that if you can help it. Don’t lie down and read. Don’t read in poor ambient light. Darkness is terrible ambient light and you’d have made the using an e-reader to lessen eyestrain point moot.

Nothing, I just found this picture really funny.

There are still some unique issues that come with books being… not books though.

• There isn’t the excitement of opening a new book and seeing new formatting anymore. It did help me jump from one book to another seeing a different margin width, differing book sizes and degrees of white or yellowing paper, different fonts and sizes, weights of books. On the other hand, most of our textbooks all had the same font, so they had a single vibe, and that meant if I wanted to throw my chemistry book on the floor, that vibe might carry over to physics, but then some things like the colours and thicknesses may differ. Or I could, you know, chuck it. Very literally.
• Easily the most annoying thing to me about e-books, and this applies only to the sort of books that are properly formatted for these devices (so not PDFs), is that you don’t know how long a book is. There are no page numbers. Only some weird metrics like “time left in the book/chapter” or word or location number, which means absolutely nothing to me. I want the page number.
• You can also resize these books, and with or without that, the text on the pages can move about a bit. Which means, if you know the line you’re looking for was somewhere in the right hand corner of page 52, there’s a big chance it’s moved just by you flipping a page. Even if you haven’t touched the font size.
• That might make you think that perhaps PDFs really are the way to go with these books, at least they know how to behave! But a PDF really is the same PDF from your laptop shrunk down to fit on a smaller screen, so the text can be small, unchangeable and leave you scrolling. You deal with it in hours of need but it can be really annoying.
• Running low on battery at important moments… I did a test with my test paper on my Kindle, with the thing flashing every 2 minutes begging me to plug it in… and I simply didn’t want to. No reason. I just sat there tutting at it going, “you’ll survive 8%, my god, stop being dramatic”. I’ll be honest, that was less of it inconveniencing me and more of the other way round.

And that’s about it! What do you think? Maybe libraries are a bigger factor in your sticking with the paper? Or maybe you’re the sort of tech-y free spirit who stick the paper to the man? I’ve had a university library send me a digital book, and it wasn’t even my university’s library. It was just one of those common publishing ones, Cambridge’s publishing press’s library system or something. But let me know! (I mean, if you’ve gotten this far, you clearly love reading and will read anything. This must be like 2000 words. I’ve been here an hour. It’s ridiculous.)