Kentukis

Your Utopia

Bora Chung2024

A collection of short stories featuring robots, AI, and corporate dystopias. The narratives focus on the failures of social systems.

clinical → sardonic, still speculative fiction

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Against the Day

Thomas Pynchon2006

A massive ensemble cast navigates the globe between the 1893 World's Fair and WWI. The plot spans airships, math, and secret societies.

clinical → playful

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Nova Express

William S. Burroughs1964

An experimental narrative uses the cut-up technique to depict a war between intergalactic criminals and the police. It is a collage of imagery.

clinical → sardonic

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Neuromancer

William Gibson1984

A washed-up data thief is hired for one last job in a high-tech underworld. The prose is dense with technical jargon.

clinical → cold

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This Man

Jodi Ellen Malpas2013

An interior designer begins an affair with a wealthy client who demands total control over her life and schedule.

clinical → tense

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Ready Player One

Ernest Cline2008

A teenager in a dystopian future hunts for a digital easter egg inside a massive simulation. The quest relies on 1980s pop culture trivia.

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Real Murders

Charlaine Harris1990

A librarian in a small Georgia town belongs to a club that studies famous crimes. A real murder occurs that mimics a historical case.

clinical → wry

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Ready Player One

Ernest Cline2008

A teenager in a dystopian future hunts for a digital easter egg inside a massive simulation. The quest relies on 1980s pop culture trivia.

clinical → propulsive

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Red Rising

Pierce Brown2014

A laborer on Mars discovers his caste is being lied to and undergoes surgery to infiltrate the ruling elite. He joins a brutal war games academy.

clinical → propulsive, still dystopian

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All Systems Red

Martha Wells2017

A self-aware security android hacks its own governor module to watch soap operas while protecting a team of scientists on a distant planet.

clinical → wry

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Beelzebub's tales to his grandson

Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff1950

An extraterrestrial being explains the history and strange behaviors of humanity to his grandson during a long space voyage.

clinical → meditative

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After London

Richard Jefferies1885

Nature reclaims England after an unspecified catastrophe destroys civilization. A young man explores the toxic swamps that were once London.

clinical → elegiac, still speculative fiction

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News from nowhere, or, An epoch of rest, being some chapters from a utopian romance

William Morris1890

A Victorian man wakes up in the year 2102. He explores a socialist agrarian society where private property and money have been abolished.

clinical → meditative, still speculative fiction

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The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers2011

A teenager decides to volunteer for a medical program that will end her life to save humanity from a biological catastrophe.

clinical → earnest, still dystopian

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Watchmen

Alan Moore1986

Retired masked vigilantes investigate the murder of a former teammate. The story takes place in an alternate 1985 on the brink of nuclear war.

clinical → bleak, still dystopian

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A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess1962

A teenage gang leader is imprisoned and subjected to state-mandated psychological conditioning. The story is told in a slang called Nadsat.

clinical → sardonic, still dystopian

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