They're made out of meat! [Review: Tender Is The Flesh]

The spread of a deadly virus leads to the elimination of livestock and animals in general - and to the creeping legalization of cannibalism and a future in which humans are farmed, bred and slaughtered for meat on an industrial scale.

Tender Is The Flesh (Cadaver Exquisito) is a dystopian novel by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica. It's told from the viewpoint of Marcos, a senior manager in the "special meat" industry with a role in every stage of the lives of the "heads." Motivated by a need to pay for his father's nursing home and recoiling from his own tragedies and the breakdown of his marriage, Marcos embodies the double-think of the time, taking pride in his expertise and business success while still  aware that he is participating in an atrocity.

There are plenty of bleak, horrific novels in the dystopia genre - not least the torture-heavy 1984 and the misogynistic violence of The Handmaid's Tale or A Walk To The End Of The World. I may have become a little desensitized to literary violence but I rarely read a book that truly horrifies me - Tender Is The Flesh is a rare example of writing that stopped me in my tracks several times, even though I was still compelled to finish reading it. 

It's clear that Bazterrica has far too much time on her hands and has spent much of it figuring out just how modern intensive livestock farming could be modified to farm humans, and all the ways that those on the right side of the electric fences might maintain the sense of denial, from the euphemisms such as "heads" and "special meat" to the scientific "evidence" presented against vegetable diets, to the legal structures protecting and regulating the process, to the removal of vocal cords from farmed humans to prevent them screaming or communicating. The detailed descriptions are shocking, particularly the chapter about 30% of the way through the novel where two job applicants are taken on a tour of the slaughterhouse. And there's still time for interesting subplots - the inhabitants of an abandoned zoo, and the implications that fear of infected bird droppings might be a conspiracy promoted by the umbrella industry.

There's an obvious between-the-lines link to ethical veganism - for those of us who eat meat, are we acting on good evidence that, say, cows are not conscious beings, or are we taking that view in order to make ourselves feel better? Is it our IQ that distinguishes us from the animals - and if so would it be OK to eat a human with lower IQ than a cow?* And what of the Ameglian Major Cow, served at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and other fine intergalactic establishments - an artificially created, sentient creature genetically programmed to offer itself up to be eaten on an entirely voluntary, consensual basis. Is that OK?**

But this novel speaks to human-on-human mistreatment too - it's about how humans dehumanize other humans in order to justify tribalism, slavery, racism, misogyny, genocide and so on, and how we give ourselves license to act in this way.

Humanity is broken in this novel - symbolised by Marcos' father, a livestock farmer whose dementia was apparently brought on following the "Transition" to human meat. Marcos and many of his generation are fully aware of the identity of "human meat" - it's an unspoken universal truth rather than a Soylent Green mystery - and they are living with the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of treating the "heads" as both human and inhuman, in turn distorting their humanity and morality. Some go for complete "We don't eat people in this house" denial, while others embrace the Transition, such as the game hunters who are equally happy aiming at purpose-bred humans or celebrities gambling their debts on a life-or-death run, or the Scavengers who kill and eat at any opportunity. Marcos is given a chance of a kind of redemption - an opportunity to re-integrate his divided world; the actual outcome reflects just how broken we all are.

*No.
**Still no.

Dystopia City - final version [Scratch game]

This is the final version of my Scratch game Dystopia City - with thanks to Scratch users E1eventeen and alpacaceratops for their comments and to everyone who played the beta. I've tweaked the gameplay, instructions have been re-written, there's a soundtrack composed in MuseScore, a better menu system and six alternate endings.

Grateful thanks to Freesounders leuphana, nathan-lomeli, samararaine, medialint, lebcraftlp, hunter4708. Thanks also to the makers of Blender and MuseScore.

Instructions:

Scroll map - Up and down arrow keys

Build - click to move the build cursor, choose a tunnel from the Build Tunnel menu or use hotkeys: C=coridoor E=elevator V=clone-vat O=office L=life support

Assign Roles - choose a Faction from the Faction-Role menu, then choose a Role to assign to that faction: Construction, Repair, Paperwork or Firefighting. For example if you choose Hufflepuffs and Paperwork then all Hufflepuffs will be assigned to do Paperwork whenever they are near an Office. At the start, all Factions are assigned to Construction.

Clonevats produce cloned citizens. Offices make money through Paperwork. Life Support produces food/oxygen/water for 10 citizens. When these tunnels break down, assign a Faction to the Repair role.

Increase the population of the Citadel to 150 to win. Keep your citizens occupied to prevent boredom - bored citizens will start to light fires or try to break out of the Citadel. You can turn the music score on and off by clicking the music button. Hint: it's not a bad idea to start by building an Office then assigning one Faction to Paperwork.

Scores on the Doors [Work in progress: Dystopia City]

Nothing says dystopian future like a double bass...

Working on a final version of my Scratch game Dystopia City - will be ready for release very soon. I've made a few tweaks to gameplay, re-written the instructions, added a few more alternate endings, and I'm working on a score in MuseScore.

Another Day In Paradise [Work In Progress: Dystopia City]

The end is in sight: I've put together the main game cycle for Dystopia City, although I'm still doing some work on the various alternate endings plus the soundtrack. Beta very soon - promise.

Where indeed?

Game produced in Scratch. Graphics hand-drawn in Paint, Paint.net or Scratch, with some backgrounds rendered in Blender.

Just another run-of-the-mill day in Dystopia City

A Lack Of The Clones [Work In Progress: Dystopia City]

Dystopia City is taking shape: I'll release a beta version soon. I had originally planned the game around the task of growing your population of cloned Citizens to 500 - but while playtesting, as I approached a population of 200 other parts of the game started to break down. As well as the Citizens themselves, who are clones in both the Scratch sense and the literal sense, I also use cloned sprites for my scrolling map, for fires and for some of the effects and menu options. A response from a helpful Scratcher on the forum confirmed my suspicion that the number of cloned sprites Scratch can handle is limited to 301.

Factions of Dystopia City

I've re-weighted the game based around a lower total population. Now working on the various possible endings, and thinking about sound effects and possibly music...

Towards A Darker Tomorrow [Work In Progress: Dystopia City]

My next Scratch project is underway - a dystopia simulator inspired by EVERY YOUNG ADULT SCI-FI NOVEL EVER.

I don't want to reveal too much about the plot but I will say that if you are a fan of post-apocalyptic underground bunker-based cities, semi-fascist societies, factions, factions and factions then you may come to like this game.

But first I have to complete it. Programming challenges so far have included creating a scrolling map that can be changed as new tunnels are built, and having large numbers of dystopian citizens exploring it. One of the best features of Scratch is, it's surprisingly fast at parallel processing: so you can have large numbers of active sprites and still keep everything moving quickly, as long as each object has a fairly short routine.

Scratch is a browser-based programming language a little like BASIC, but with an easy to learn object-orientated structure and commands that click together LEGO-style. It's provided free by MIT here in order to encourage the younglings to take up programming.

When I started programming as a child (I was raised in BASIC IV) I learned by experimentation and mistake-making. Over the years I've learned a little of other languages: 6502 Assembler, Basic V, C, Inform, DarkBASIC, COFFEE, HTML and Python. Scratch is the first language I've tried that brings back that feeling of experimentation.

Hi Honey, I'm Home [Review: The Bees]

Flora 717 is born to a life of drudgery as a sanitation worker, the lowest caste in a walled, fascist Queendom where only a lucky few foragers and drones get to see the outside world. She's an outsider due to her abilities - she can literally talk, unlike the rest of her caste, she is intelligent and questioning, and she has ideas above her station - and if the guards or the Fertility Police don't stop her, she just might be the cause of a revolution one day. Yes, this is every YA dystopian novel scenario ever, rolled into one book - but Flora 717 is a bee, and just for once the scenario actually makes sense.

Laline Paull's novel follows in a great tradition of anthropomorphization - Animal Farm, Watership Down. There are one or two flights of fancy - the chambers of the beehive have doors and scent-coded floor panels, the police have visors and gauntlets, and the bees have a jet engine in their abdomen. This last might be a reference to the old idea of scientists being convinced that bees could not fly - but as we all know, the 2005 Altshuler study (abstract here) put that one to rest. I mean, it's always seemed obvious to me that unsteady forces during stroke reversal would make a large contribution to net upward force during hovering, but then what do I know? I'm just a drone...

This book can be enjoyed twice - first by reading it and then by fact-checking it. With the exception of the doors and the jet engines, it was a lot of fun discovering that almost every concept in the plot is factually accurate with very little embroidery. Take the wide range of worker castes and activities - or the scent produced by a Queen which keeps the entire hive loyal - or the lazy drone lifestyle - or the winter cluster - or the not-so-royal behaviour of newly hatched Princesses - or even Flora 717's secret, it's all there in the real-life complexity of honey bee society.

Campaign For A Worse Tomorrow

So I've read The Hunger Games, Divergent, Delirium, Wool, Inside Out, The Bone Season, and recently Laline Paull's novel "The Bees." For the most part I've enjoyed them - but how do they stack up against the work of classic dystopian writers such as George Orwell or Suzy McKee Charnas?

What's not missing is some quality writing, with strong characters and intense settings. I think the opposite is true, this is a real strength of the genre right now and it's very clear , if only from the sales figures, that these books have been ensnaring and captivating new readers. So what's missing?

1. Originality While there are a lot of original concepts in all of the above books, there are also a lot of unoriginal ones: like the walled city, the fascist police, the rigid caste system, the unfair division of wealth, the outcast hero and of course the love affair that spans all boundaries. It all makes a good literary drinking game to play at your book group, but the result is a kind of create-a-dystopian-society-by-the-numbers. As if to prove the point, random YA dystopia generators have sprung up here and here.

It's a kind of laziness - save time developing your own backstory by referring to someone else's. To be fair it's not unique to this genre at all, it's something that occurs throughout literature. The result is a backstory that doesn't feel credible and doesn't connect to the real world. An exception is "The Bees" where the walled hive and the caste system make sense as the main characters are bees.

2. Social Commentary George Orwell's "1984" was driven by the development of Communism into a totalitarian state, and the fear that this could be the future of the world. "A Walk To The End Of The World" by Suzy Mckee Charnas is a feminist novel taking male oppression to a seriously extreme conclusion. While the new-ish wave does seem to care about class or wealth inequalities, these feel like easy targets but there's no real attempt to criticise or satirise present-day countries, societies, governments or political trends.

3. Hardcore suffering Kurt Vonnegut's famous advice to writers (summarised here) includes the following gem: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of." I'm not saying Katniss and the others don't suffer at all. But in all honesty I don't think she, Flora 717 or any of the new-wave heroes would last very long in Room 101.

4. Some curious omissions The Panem society, the Divergent scenario and many of the above settings, for all their fascist trappings, are surprisingly feminist. It's as if the overlords took a few years out of their plan to conquer and enslave the poor, in order to achieve total gender equality, apparently with minimum effort. Well done, dystopian leaders! Once again, "The Bees" is a notable exception.

So I propose to write a dystopia about a teenage girl growing up in a society where everyone is forced to read dystopian fiction from birth, who starts to suspect that, beyond the mysterious wall of dystopian books there might be some other mysterious reality, and who must pluck up the courage to lead a revolution so that her kin can enjoy (for example) Scandinavian detective novels. Cheers...

How To Review A Book

I think it's fair to say that many of the reviews on this blog are not technically "reviews" but more "responses" - I'm not trying to provide a Which? Dystopian Novel service but to write honestly about my own reaction to what I've seen or read, and where it takes me. So I fail on two counts - I've been held up on occasion for failing to give a score out of 10 (thank you Actress Confessions sweetie) but nor am I writing traditional literary analysis.

It's good to learn, grow and develop, so here are some ideas about how to write more in-depth book reviews, together with an example drawn from a classic piece of utopian-dystopian fiction. This is neither comprehensive nor ecumenical: I intend to draw on some, all or none of these points in future and would be interested in other approaches to reviewing as well.

What is the book about?

The novel is set in an eco-friendly future where, possibly due to genetic engineering "even the trees are happy." The protagonist, either the engineer of this society or some kind of mascot, becomes restless and walks beyond the boundary of the known into an unfamiliar forest, where chance discoveries bring him face to face with a genuinely miserable person - at which point he must make the most important choice in both their lives.

What does it achieve?

The story develops a highly optimistic philosophy: universal happiness can be achieved but misery must be acknowledged and confronted rather than excluded.

How does it achieve it?

The setting is simply presented as fact: the workings of Happyland society are never revealed. As Arthur C. Clark almost said: "Any novel about sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic realism." The hero is the archetypal Happy Man, and his nemesis the Miserable Man he meets at the foot of the staircase is identical in every way apart from his unexplained melancholia, so is clearly an unconscious facet of the Happy Man's psyche as well as fulfilling a scapegoat role for the Happylanders.

Place it in context:

This novel is the first and most familiar in a long-running series: while each book ostensibly takes as its focus a new protagonist, the Happy Man recurs throughout and through his relationships with other archetypes develops several longer story arcs. The series has had a positive reception over the years with several television adaptations and a second, feminised spin-off series to offset the male dominance of the canon.

Enforced happiness is a common trope within the utopia-dystopia science fiction subgenre. This novel draws heavily on classics such as Brave New World and has in turn influenced subsequent visions of the future: Equilibrium (2002) Demolition Man (1993) and The Happiness Patrol (Doctor Who, BBC, broadcast 1988) are particularly indebted. The latter is an inversion of the basic plot with the Happy Man replaced by the sinister Kandy Man who kills through excessive joy. Symbolic elements of this story have also been influential on their own: the spiral staircase separating the Happy Man from his Miserable counterpart is "borrowed" to great effect in GATTACA (1997.)

Give an honest reaction:

There's often a tension between optimistic and dystopic science fiction. This novel clearly falls into the first category. I enjoyed the plot with it's many twists but felt the optimism went a little too far, with the ending even hinting at totalitarianism. Is absolute happiness either achievable or desirable? In this society, even though the Miserable Man can be welcomed, he does in the process have to abandon his misery altogether: there's no room for either legitimate misery or for the blues. The Happiness Patrol at least ends on a different, more satisfying harmonica note.

You can buy "Mr. Happy" by Roger Hargreaves at all good bookstores.

Am I Hot Or Not Part II [Review: Rate Me Red]

Richie Chevat's e-book Rate Me Red is a Brave New World to rival Blind Faith's 1984. It also describes a future extrapolated from today's Internet: again we have Facebook-style sharing and liking, together with a combination of YouTube vlogging and Second Life where your real-life clothes are cheap, but you then pay thousands of pounds more for your vid avatar to be seen wearing them.

Unlike Brave New World, where social mobility is zero and caste is defined before birth, Rate Me Red and Blind Faith describe futures where your social standing depends totally on your popularity – the Oranges and Yellows of Vidnet know that a chance encounter could precipitate a life-destroying chromofall at any time.

For the most part Vidnet society is a Machine Stops lifestyle - the novel follows hero Gordy through a real-life date and sexual encounter with his girlfriend Poppy, which is such a rare, shocking occurrence that it will surely boost both their ratings. The way everyone belongs to massive transnational corporations also reminded me of Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government, reviewed here.

You face a double humiliation in this future: not only must your every failure and embarrassment be made available to everyone over the net, but even worse – no-one’s actually watching it. In Blind Faith etiquette requires that you tell everyone how much you’ve enjoyed watching them argue or have sex, but of course no-one actually does because they’re self obsessed. In Rate Me Red you can’t actually keep up with all of your Twitter-style followers – so you buy a digital avatar who can do it for you, right down to replying to your e-mails.

Rate Me Red is bursting with ideas, from the ghetto-bound Blue underclass and mythical Purple untouchables to the pathetically intellectual Rejectionists. I particularly liked the idea that you couldn't be a success until you had a hate campaign against you - luckily Gordy's best friend is happy to oblige.

Neologisms TM have defined the dystopic fiction genre since 1984 and Clockwork Orange. They’re widely used here and while this is often effective there are a few misfires such as the constant referral to Real Life TM. This would be my only Criticism TM of Chevat’s writing – and on the other hand, perhaps because Chevat is also a playwright, the dialogue is particularly funny and well written, and the novel as a whole has a great pace. You can find out more or download the e-book from the author's website.

Am I Hot Or Not Part I [Review: Blind Faith]

Global warming meets Am I Hot Or Not by way of 1984 in Ben Elton's novel Blind Faith. The setting is a Facebook-style future following a rise in sea-level. Privacy and secrets are now perversions: you are required by law to share every aspect of your life. Consumerism, voyeurism and constant ratings are the norms, and there's a chatroom moderator in every block of flats constantly monitoring and interfering with your lives.

Elton uses this setting to tell a story that isn't really about Internet culture but about the rise of ignorance and celebrity obsession in general. Tabloid-style mob justice keeps everyone on their toes and there's a sinister populist religion that has taken advantage of the situation. In this future, the neonatal death rate has skyrocketed and the people have forgotten that it was not always so - a third of the way through, the story changes direction and follows a secret order who continue to provide children with vaccinations in a world where the ignorant population has rejected them as evil and unnatural.

This change in direction doesn't really help the narrative. Nevertheless the satire is spot on - the religious council that suddenly declares that everyone is now a celebrity, or the much repeated slogan "What's not to like?" are products of a society that is self-obsessed to delusional levels. I fully endorse the aims and methods of this novel, and it's an enjoyable satirical read if not quite on a par with Gridlock, Stark or Popcorn.

Choose Your Own Dystopia (TM)

London's cultural and tourist scene is fairly sci-fi friendly at present. I posted about the last Turbine Hall installation here, both a sci-fi experience in itself and a nostalgic collection of sci-fi books and film clips. More recently I visited the London Transport Museum, creeping past a group of stormtroopers in Picadilly Circus en route (it was a sci-fi kind of day).

LTM is mainly concerned with the history of bus, tram and tube travel. However the last exhibit, just before the exit ramp, is an installation that allows you to make choices about present day society, then mixes and matches elements to generate a version of society in 2055. The focus is predictably climate change and the threat of "energy shock" however the scenarios generated are wide-ranging and all very dystopian - ranging from an always-on society where people live and work in their car-offices, constantly moving under computer control, through a 1984-style scenario where the poor sell their carbon credits to the rich and everyone lives in fear of the carbon police who monitor your every footstep - to the other extreme where people live in ruined office blocks and skyscrapers, growing crops up the walls and living sustainable, recyclable lives but long-distance travel is all but forgotten and anarchy/gang law rules.

You can use the Future Generator online on the LTM website here.

All-time most dystopian dystopia

The competition to create science-fiction's most dystopian dystopia of all time was won, permanently, in 1977. George Orwell's 1984, the bookies' favourite, came in second, pipped in the post by this short but powerful novel of misogynism and post-apocalyptic survival. Suzy McKee Charnas went on to write a more upbeat sequel about women who like horses... a lot... meanwhile if you want to read about near-future enslavement and dehumanization of women, but don't want too harrowing an experience, you can stroll gently to the end of the world in non-science-fiction science-fiction classic The Handmaid's tale by Margaret Attwood.



You can read Mish's review of the Handmaid's Tale here: http://mishscifimusings.blogspot.com/2008/10/margaret-atwood-and-science-fiction.html