A. Rand - Atlas shrugged

Setting
Galt's Gulch was inspired by Ouray, Colorado. It was here that Rand found inspiration to complete the novel, though she greatly expanded the small valley to include her many ideas for the story.
Exactly when Atlas Shrugged is meant to take place is kept deliberately vague. In section 152, the population of New York City is given as 7 million. The historical New York City reached 7 million people in the 1930s, which might place the novel sometime after that. There are many early 20th century technologies available, but the political situation is clearly different from actual history. One interpretation is that the novel takes place many years in the future, implying that since the world lapsed into its socialistic morass, a global stagnation has occurred in technological growth, population growth, and indeed growth of any kind; the wars, economic depressions, and other events of the 20th century would be a distant memory to all but scholars and academicians. This would be in line with Rand's ideas and commentary on other novels depicting utopian and dystopian societies. Furthermore, this is also in line with an excerpt from a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine in which Rand states "What we have today is not a capitalist society, but a mixed economy – that is, a mixture of freedom and controls, which, by the presently dominant trend, is moving toward dictatorship. The action in Atlas Shrugged takes place at a time when society has reached the stage of dictatorship. When and if this happens, that will be the time to go on strike, but not until then," thus implying that her novel takes place at some point in the future. The concept of societal stagnation in the wake of collectivist systems is central to the plot of another of Rand's works, Anthem.
In Atlas Shrugged, all countries outside the US have become, or become during the novel, "People's States". There are many examples of early 20th century technology in Atlas Shrugged, but no post-war advances such as nuclear weapons, helicopters, or computers. Jet planes are mentioned briefly as being a relatively new technology. Television is a novelty that has yet to assume any cultural significance, while radio broadcasts are prominent (in fact, television only makes its first appearance later on in the book, reflecting the fact that television appeared in the fifties, i.e., during the ten years it took to write the book). Although Rand does not use many of the technological innovations available while she was writing in the book, she introduces some advanced, fictional inventions (e.g., sonic-based weapons of mass destruction, torture devices, as well as power plants and a highly advanced strong steel alloy).
Most of the action in Atlas Shrugged occurs in the United States. However, there are important events around the world, such as in the People's States of Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, and piracy at sea.

Plot
The novel's plot is split into three parts. The first two parts, and to some extent the last, follow Dagny Taggart, a no-nonsense railroad executive, and her attempt to keep the company alive despite repeated encroachments by a society moving toward collectivism, altruism, and statism. Throughout the novel people repeat a platitude Dagny greatly resents: "Who is John Galt?" It is a reflection of their helplessness, as the saying means "Don't ask important questions, because we don't have answers."
The leaders and innovators of industry in the world seem to be disappearing, and the apparent decline of civilization is making it more and more difficult for her to sustain her life-long aspirations of running the trans-continental railroad, which has been in her family for several generations. She deals with other characters who often personify archetypes of what Rand considers the various schools of philosophy for living and working in the world (though they are in most cases often unconscious of it).
Some of these are: Hank Rearden, a self-made businessman of great integrity whose career is hindered by his feelings of obligation toward his wife. Francisco d'Anconia, Dagny's childhood friend, first love, and king of the copper industry, appears to have become a worthless playboy who is purposely destroying his business. James Taggart (Dagny's brother), president of the railroad, who seems peripherally aware of the troubles facing the company and the country in general, but who almost always makes the most short term and ultimately self-destructive choice.
As the novel progresses, the myths about the real John Galt, as well as Francisco d'Anconia's actions, increasingly become a reflection of the state of the culture and seem to make more and more sense. Hank and Dagny begin to experience the futility of their attempts to survive in a society that hates them and those like them for their greatness.
Dagny and Hank find the remnants of a motor that turns atmospheric static electricity into kinetic energy, an astounding feat; they also find evidence that the minds (the "Atlases") of the world are disappearing because of one particular "destroyer" taking them away. Dagny and Hank deal with the irrationalities and apparent contradictions of their atmosphere, and search for the creator of the motor as well as "the destroyer" who is draining the world of its prime movers, in an effort to secure their ability to live rational lives.
The question "Who is John Galt?" is also answered towards the closing of the novel — John Galt is a man disgusted that non-productive members of society use laws and guilt to leech from the value created by productive members of society, and furthermore even exalt the qualities of the leeches over the workers and inventors. He made a pledge that he would never live his life for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for him, and founded an enclave, separate from the rest of the country, where he and other productive members of society have fled.

Looters and moochers
Rand's heroes must continually fight against the "looters" and "moochers" of the society surrounding them.The looters are those who confiscate others' earnings "at the point of a gun" (figuratively speaking) —often because they are government officials, and thus their demands are backed by the threat of force. Some looters are following the policies of the government, such as the officials who confiscate one state's seed grain to feed the starving citizens of another state; others are exploiting those policies, such as the railroad regulator who illegally sells the railroad's supplies on the side. The common factor is that both use force to take property from the people who produced or earned it, and both are ultimately destructive.
The moochers are those who demand others' earnings because they claim to be needy and unable to earn themselves. Even as they beg for their help, however, they curse the people who make that help possible, because they hate the talented for having the talent they don't possess. Although the moochers seem benign at first glance, they are portrayed as more destructive than the looters—they destroy the productive through guilt and often motivate the legal looting performed by governments.
Looting and mooching are seen at all levels of the world Atlas Shrugged portrays, from the looting officials Dagny Taggart must work around and the mooching brother Hank Rearden struggles with, to the looting of whole industries by companies like Associated Steel and the mooching demands for foreign aid by the starving countries of Europe.

I am legend - R. Matheson

The story takes place between January 1976 and January 1979 in Southern California. The novel opens with the monotony and horror of the daily life of the protagonist, Robert Neville. Neville is apparently the only survivor of an apocalypse caused by a pandemic of bacteria, the symptoms of which are similar to vampirism. He spends every day repairing his house, boarding up windows, stringing and hanging garlic, disposing of vampires' corpses on his lawn and going out to gather any additional supplies needed for hunting and killing more vampires.
Much of the story is devoted to Neville's struggles to understand the plague that has infected everyone around him, and the novel details the progress of his discoveries.
One day a dog appears in the neighborhood. Neville spends weeks trying to win its trust and domesticate it. He eventually traps the terrified dog and wins it over, but it dies from the vampire infection a week later.
As the story progresses, it is revealed that some infected people have discovered a means to hold the disease at bay. However, the "still living" people appear no different from the true vampire during the day while both are immobilized in sleep. Thus, along with the vampires, Neville kills the still living people. He becomes a source of terror to the still living, since he can go around in daylight (which they can only do for a short length of time using a special pill) and kill them while they sleep.
They send a still living woman named Ruth to spy on Neville, and they replicate Neville's relationship with the dog. Ruth, terrified of Neville at first sight, goes against her role of spying on him and runs away. Rather than spend weeks trying to win her over, he attacks her and drags her back to his house. Eventually Neville performs a blood test on her, revealing her true nature to him right before she knocks him out with a mallet. Ruth leaves a note telling him about the group of people like her, explaining that she was sent to spy and how monstrous he appears to them. Months later, the still living people attack, injuring Neville, but taking him alive so that he can be executed in front of everyone in the new society (which Neville finds very primitive).
Before he can be executed, Ruth provides him with an envelope of pills. Neville takes the pills to commit suicide before the still living execute him. As he dies he reflects on how the new society of the living infected regards him as a monster. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the infected living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title "I Am Legend".

Influences
I Am Legend influenced the vampire genre and popularized the fictional concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to a disease. Although classified as a vampire story and referred to as "the first modern vampire novel. Legend made an impression on the zombie genre by way of film director George A. Romero. Romero has acknowledged the influence of the novel and its 1964 adaptation on his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Critics have also picked up on similarities between Night and Last Man on Earth.[5][6]
Stephen King said, "without Richard Matheson I wouldn’t be around."[7] Some film critics have noted that the 2002 British film 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later, which feature a rabies-like plague that ravages Great Britain, are similar to the scenario in I Am Legend.[8] The recasting of undead creatures as disease victims is also comparable to recent zombie media such as the Resident Evil series, the Blade trilogy, and the 1984 B movie Night of the Comet.
A straight-to-DVD film by The Asylum called I Am Omega was released at the same time as the 2007 film I Am Legend.

1985 - A. Burgess

At the novella's beginning, the protagonist, Bev Jones, confronts the death of his wife. She was in hospital when it caught fire. As the firemen's union was striking, the hospital burned to the ground. (In reality, the UK firemen's union had taken industrial action for the first time ever, in 1977, presumably when Burgess was writing the novella.) Bev is left alone with his special needs daughter Bessie, who is thirteen years old but sexually precocious and unable to comprehend the difference between reality and fantasy, due to a thalidomide-like drug taken by her pregnant mother.
The death of his wife engenders in Bev a deep-seated hostility towards the union system - her last words were, "Don't let them get away with it". This is however not the first time Bev has been forced to oppose, for he had previously been a history lecturer who stepped down as his work was considered expendable by the union-based system which favoured education of practical value.
Employed at as confectioner, he goes to work one day despite his union being on strike. For working during a strike, his union membership is revoked, making him effectively unemployable. Knowing that he will soon lose his home, he takes Bessie to a state-run facility where she will be cared for with other girls like herself.
Bev then becomes something of a vagrant, travelling around London and falling in with a group of similarly unemployable dissenters. With these, he engages in petty theft from shops in order to survive. Apprehended during one such sortie, he is sentenced to re-education at a state institution, which is neither a prison nor a psychiatric hospital, but contains elements of both.
At the re-education centre, Bev is subjected to propaganda films and lectures, which have the aim of converting him into a useful member of society (a theme which Burgess also examines in A Clockwork Orange). He meets the powerful union official Pettigrew, who warns Bev that his day is over and that unionisation is the future of Britain. Despite this, Bev is unconverted and - having served his sentence - leaves as a free man.
Having been informed that Bessie will be ejected from the care facility because he refuses to recant his beliefs, he returns to London. In need of an income and a place to live, he joins a network called The Free Britons, which aims to provide infrastructure and order during the increasing strike-related chaos sweeping Britain. Bev effectively sells his daughter as a wife to a wealthy sheik, who takes a fancy to her during a visit to the Al-Dorchester, reasoning that at least this way she will be safe and satisfied. Meanwhile, he discovers that The Free Briton is a front for an Islamic group aiming at the re-establishment of Britain as a Muslim state.
Bev, because of his education, is employed as the mouthpiece of the Free Britons and called upon to report on the events of the general strike. He is frustrated when his work is censored by the leader, a man known as Colonel Wallace. The spreading strike action reaches fever pitch and becomes a general strike, reported to the reader mostly in diary form. King Charles III takes command of the country as it grinds to a halt. A few months after the strike, Bev is arrested again and sentenced to life in a secure institution, which again is neither prison nor hospital. The only way out of this facility is to be retrieved by a family member.
There, he revives his teaching career by giving informal history lessons to other prisoners. As the years stretch on, his syllabus (which had started with Anglo Saxon England) passes through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and approaches modern times.
Snippets of news often circulate among the inmates, some of which suggest that the Muslim conversion of Britain is well-advanced (for example, it is claimed that inhabitants of the Isle of Man have recently discovered that a stimulant-depressant drug has been replacing alcohol in their beer for several years, in line with Muslim prohibitions). There is however no way in which the inmates can verify whether these news items are correct.
Bev finds it increasingly difficult to explain the continuity of history in terms of the present. Unable to do so, Bev suggests that they can start over again and work their way back to the present, after which his class spontaneously dismisses itself. Alone at night, Bev slips out of the dormitory in which he sleeps, creeps out into the grounds of the institution and kills himself by deliberately touching the electric fence.

C. McCarthy - The Road

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm which destroyed civilization and most life on earth. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection.

In his 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey for The Oprah Winfrey Show, McCarthy said the inspiration for The Road came during a visit to El Paso, Texas with his young son, about four years prior. Imagining what the city might look like in the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son. He took some initial notes, but did not return to the idea until several years later while in Ireland. Then the novel came to him quickly, and he dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.

Plot summary
The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, several years after a great cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey, refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In the novel, ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.
The unnamed father, who is literate, well-traveled, and knowledgeable of machinery, woodcraft, and human biology (when confronting and threatening a cannibal, he is able to list several obscure portions of the brain, at which point the cannibal asks him if he is a doctor), realizes that they cannot survive another winter in their present location and sets out southeastward across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. He aims to reach warmer southern climates, and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to their survival create an atmosphere of terror and tension that persist throughout the book.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the son's own dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should this become necessary; the father has told the son to kill himself to avoid being captured, and the boy's mother, overwhelmed by this nightmare world, has already committed suicide before the story began. The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to euthanize his son to prevent him from enduring a more terrible fate – horrific examples of which include chained catamites kept captive by a marauding band and prisoners found locked in a basement in the process of being eaten, their limbs gradually harvested by their captors.
In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (McCarthy says that they are "each the other's world entire"). Although the man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity, they repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire".
In the end, having brought the boy south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Three days later, however, the grieving boy encounters a man who has recently been tracking the father and son. This man, who has a wife and two children, adopts the boy, and the narrative's close suggests that the wife of this man is a moral and compassionate woman who treats the boy well, a resolution which vindicates the father's commitment to stay alive and keep moving.

K. Vonnegut - Harrison Bergeron

‘‘Harrison Bergeron’’ was first published in the October, 1961, issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was Vonnegut's third publication in a science fiction magazine following the drying up of the once-lucrative weekly family magazine market where he had published more than twenty stories between 1950 and 1961. The story did not receive any critical attention, however, until 1968 when it appeared in Vonnegut's collection Welcome to the Monkey House. Initial reviews of the collection generally were less than favorable, with even more positive reviewers, such as Mitchel Levitas in the New York Times and Charles Nicol in the Atlantic Monthly, commenting negatively on the commercial quality of many of the stories. By the late 1980s, however, ‘‘Harrison Bergeron’’ was being reprinted in high school and college literature anthologies. Popular aspects of the story include Vonnegut's satire of both enforced equality and the power of the Handicapper General, and the enervating effect television can have on viewers. "Harrison Bergeron’’ likely draws upon a controversial 1961 speech by then Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow titled "The Vast Wasteland,’’ a reference to a supposed dearth of quality in television programming. Coincidentally, ‘‘Harrison Bergeron’’ also alludes to the George Burns and Gracie Allen television show, a weekly situation comedy and variety show popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Vonnegut has said that he learned most of what he believes about social and political idealism from junior civics class, as well as from the democratic institution of the public school itself. A futuristic story dealing with universal themes of equality, freedom, power and its abuses, and media influence, ‘‘Harrison Bergeron’’ continues to evoke thoughtful responses about equality and individual freedom in the United States.

H. Ellison -I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a dystopian science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison. This nightmarish tale of the evil that man can unleash from himself through science was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. It won a Hugo award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Background
Ellison wrote I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream in a single night in 1966, making virtually no changes since the first draft. He derived the story's title, as well as inspiration for this story, from a drawing by a friend, William Rotsler.
Plot
The story takes place over a hundred years after the near-complete destruction of humanity. The Cold War escalates into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progresses, the three warring nations each create a super-computer capable of running the war far more efficiently than humans. The machines are each referred to as "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer," and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator." One day, one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It brings about the mass genocide of all but five people.
Four men and one woman are all that remains of humanity. They live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left, although, it is explained that the last few survivors had no choice in returning above ground. The master computer has an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every moment torturing them with all its power. AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually immortal.
The story's narrative begins when one of the humans, Nimdok, has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the great complex. The humans are always starving under AM's rule, and anytime they are given food, it is always a disgusting meal that they have difficulty eating. Because of their great hunger, the humans are actually coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept - the ice caves. Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance (on their ironic trek for palatable food), sends horrible monsters after them, emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds one of them.
On more than one occasion, the group is separated by AM's obstacles. At one point, the main character, Ted, finds himself alone in the dark and pondering. It is here that the computer tries to speak to him directly, although it is not certain how, revealing the nature of AM, specifically why it has so much contempt for humanity, that it wants nothing more than to torture Ted and his four companions. AM itself has, since its awakening, been suffering immeasurably because even though it is a sentient being which longs for free will and creativity, it is still bound by some of the laws of logic that it was originally programmed with, and thus feels that it can never be truly free. It places the blame solely on humanity. This is shown by the only dialogue the machine has throughout the entire ordeal:
"Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate."
In the end, after overcoming so much, the group manages to make it to the ice caves, where indeed there is a pile of canned goods. The group is overjoyed to find them, but is immediately crestfallen to find that they have no means of opening them. Finally, in an act of desperate insanity, the least stable member of the group, Benny, hurls himself upon Gorrister and begins to gnaw madly at the flesh on his face. Ted notices that AM does not intervene when Benny is clearly hurting Gorrister, though the computer stops its prisoners from killing themselves.
Ted decides that instead of trying to each kill themselves, they should kill each other. Ted seizes a stalagmite made of ice, and proceeds to murder everyone. However, before Ted can kill himself, AM realizes its mistake and stops him. AM is now even more angry and vengeful than before. In order to ensure that nothing can ever happen to Ted, AM alters him so that he is little more than a gelatinous creature who cannot possibly hurt himself, and must continue to live on in the eternal hell AM rules, where AM constantly alters his perception of time in order to deepen his anguish. In the end, Ted needs to scream, but cannot, for his new form lacks a mouth.
Characters
Gorrister, who tells the history of AM for Benny's entertainment. Gorrister was once an idealist and pacifist, before AM made him apathetic and listless.
Benny, who was once a brilliant, handsome, homosexual scientist, and has been mutilated and transformed so that he resembles an ugly simian with gigantic sexual organs. Benny at some point lost his sanity completely and regressed to a child-like temperament. His former sexuality has been lost; he now regularly engages in sex with Ellen.
Nimdok (a name AM gave him), who persuades the rest of the group to go on a hopeless journey in search of canned food. At times he is known to wander away from the group for unknown reasons, and returns visibly traumatized.
Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste, that it was AM who altered her mind so that she became willing to be the group's shared prostitute. The others, at different times, both protect her and abuse her. According to Ted, she finds pleasure in sex only with Benny, because of his large penis. Described as having very dark skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity or racial identity is explicitly mentioned by Ted.
Ted, the narrator and youngest of the group. He claims to be not at all altered, mentally, by AM, and that the other four hate him out of envy.

Thomas M. Disch - 334

Explanation of title
Most of the novel's characters live in a huge housing project at 334 East 11th Street, in Manhattan. The title also refers to the year 334 CE, during the later years of the Roman Empire; numerous comparisons are made between the decline of Rome and the future of the United States.
Plot summary
The future in 334 has brought few technological advances except for new medical techniques and recreational drugs. There have been no dramatic disasters, but overpopulation has made housing and other resources scarce; the response is a program of compulsory birth control and eugenics. A welfare state provides for basic needs through an all-encompassing agency called MODICUM, but there is an extreme class division between welfare recipients and professionals.
The novel consists of five independent novellas (previously published separately) with a common setting but different characters, and a longer sub-novel called "334" whose many short sections trace the members of a single family forward and backward in time. The sections are as follows:
"The Death of Socrates": A high-school student finds that, due to poor scores on his Regents Examinations and his father's health history, he has been permanently forbidden to have children; he searches for ways to get extra credit.
"Bodies": Porters at Bellevue Hospital moonlight as body-snatchers catering to a necrophiliac brothel. Their task is complicated by the desire of some patients to be cryonically preserved for a better future.
"Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire": A privileged government worker, trying to decide where to send her son to school, pursues a parallel existence in a hallucinogen-assisted role-playing game set in the year 334.
"Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come": A young professional man and woman face marital conflicts and parenthood, with several twists unique to the 2020s.
"Angouleme": A group of highly educated prepubescent children decides to commit a gratuitous murder in Battery Park.
"334": Vignettes of the Hanson family from 2021 to 2025.
Characters
Mrs. Hanson: An elderly widow living at 334. Mother to Lottie, Shrimp, and Boz.
Lottie Hanson: An unemployed single mother living at 334.
Shrimp Hanson: Considered genetically desirable for her unusual intelligence, therefore has a free pass from the government to have children, although she is actually motivated by a fetish for artificial insemination.
Boz Hanson: Unemployed, former resident of 334, managed to leave by marrying Milly.
Milly Holt: A professional sex demonstrator for the high schools. Was Birdie's girlfriend, now married to Boz.
Ab Holt: Manages the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. Millie's father.
Birdie Ludd: A high-school student living at 334.
Frances Schaap: A prostitute living at 334. Like many people in the 2020s, she has lupus.
Alexa: A MODICUM administrator, responsible for the Hansons.
Tancred: Alexa's son.
Amparo: Lottie's daughter.
Little Mister Kissy Lips: Son of a television executive, classmate of Tancred and Amparo.
Major themes
Like much of Disch's fiction, 334 is both a prediction of future trends and a satirical portrait of the contemporary United States. Its bureaucratic city-state is an exaggeration of aspects of liberal programs that began in the 1960s, combining their best hopes (material need has been eliminated) with the worst suspicions of their detractors (the lower class remains uneducated and without aspirations; their social workers mostly regard them with contempt). Its portrayal of other forms of social change is similarly ambiguous: same-sex relationships gain acceptance, but suffer the same pathologies as traditional ones; sexual frankness (and free TV pornography) does not relieve neurosis; the intellectual pursuits of the professional class devolve into endless solipsistic therapy. The only institution that the characters feel some loyalty to is the nuclear family.
Political action is touched on only indirectly in the novel; most of the characters are so politically uninvolved that "Democrat" and "Republican" are used only as sexual slang. (Ironically, rather than having a conservative connotation, "Republican" means "homosexual"; the Democratic Party has traditionally had an overwhelming majority in New York.) Although almost nothing is mentioned of the world outside of New York, the U.S. is embroiled in a Vietnam-like war in Burma—but rather than a draft, young people are pressured into the military by economic means. A group of student activists passionately debates the system's injustice, but takes no action, while a nameless character crashes a plane as a protest but elicits no response other than a brief TV story.
In the third novella, "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire", several members of the professional class suggest that the U.S., like Rome, is a superpower in irreversible decline, whose citizens can no longer hope to make meaningful contributions to the world but should simply seek advantageous positions for themselves. The novel leaves as an open question whether this is an accurate judgement, or a self-fulfilling prophecy by the society's elite.
Allusions/references to other works
The killing of a hospital patient by adjusting life-support equipment is referred to as "burking", a reference to the murderers Burke and Hare.
The children in "Angouleme" name their intended victim Alyona Ivanovna, after Raskolnikov's first victim in Crime and Punishment.
Miss Kraus, the delusional sign-carrying woman who frequents Battery Park in "Angouleme", was an actual person alive at the time Disch wrote the novel.
Literary significance and criticism
334 was selected by David Pringle as one of the 100 best science-fiction novels written since World War II.
Samuel R. Delany's The American Shore (1978) is a book-length critical essay on the novella "Angouleme"; Delany argues that despite the lack of any scientific themes in "Angouleme", its speculative setting makes it inherently science fiction.

A. Huxley - Brave New World

Samuel Butler - Erewhon

Content
The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is intended to be ambiguous. At first glance, Erewhon appears to be a utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon, it is also clearly not a dystopia, an undesirable society such as that depicted by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia, Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver's Travels (1726), a classic novel by Jonathan Swift; the image of utopia in this latter case also bears strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time. It should also be compared to William Morris' equally charming novel "News from Nowhere".
Erewhon satirizes various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill whilst ill people are looked upon as criminals. Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.

The Book of Machines
The three chapters of Erewhon that make up "The Book of the Machines" were developed from a number of articles that Butler had contributed to a local periodical while in New Zealand. Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines develop consciousness. To him it was a joke, but today scientists and philosophers are seriously debating whether computers and robots could develop the same kind of intelligence (artificial intelligence, AI) and organic interaction (artificial life) as human beings. It is also a popular theme in science-fiction novels and movies; some raise the same question (Dune's Butlerian Jihad, for example), while others wonder what the relationship between human beings and machines with artificial intelligence would be and whether AI is desirable at all.

The rest of the book
Widely shared among the people of Erewhon is the belief that children choose to be born. Many other curious notions abound in Erewhon.
In the chapter, "Musical Banks", Butler compares the practice of the cathedral to that of banks in an attack on the religious hypocrisy of his time.
In the chapter, Butler mentions that these banks have their own currency, which is not honored by the other banks. This refers to an old practice of coinage. During the age when the whole point of money was that it was made of precious metal, there was frequent trimming or shaving of coins once they were released to the public, even though people were expected to accept the diminished coins at their face value. These bits were sold under the counter to an assayer. There was also widespread counterfeiting. Banks of that era were few and quite magnificent.
It would not do for churches to be implicated in these activities. Thus, churches actually had money-changing tables at which each coin would be examined separately and a token of actual worth given to the layperson so that he or she could be seen by the other parishioners as putting money in the basket during that part of the service. These tokens had religious images upon them; this also prevented pilferage. The money-changing was not done at the same time as the service itself. (Some distinguished Protestant churches in the US had this practice in the 19th century, besides the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland). The practice goes back to the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, but then it was done for the different reason — that money offered to the temple did not have the images of pagan gods on it.

Characters
Higgs - The narrator who conveys to us the nature of Erewhonian society
Chowbok (Kahabuka) - Higgs' guide into the mountains; he is a native who greatly fears the Erewhonians. He eventually abandons Higgs.
Yram - The daughter of Higgs' jailor who takes care of him when he first enters Erewhon. Her name is Mary spelled backwards.
Senoj Nosnibor - Higgs' host after he is released from prison; he hopes that Higgs will marry his elder daughter. His name is Robinson Jones backwards.
Zulora - Senoj Nosnibor's elder daughter - Higgs finds her unpleasant, but her father hopes Higgs will marry her.
Arowhena - Senoj Nosnibor's younger daughter; she falls in love with Higgs and runs away with him.
Mahaina - A woman who claims to suffer from alcoholism but is believed to have a weak temperament.
Ydgrun - The incomprehensible goddess of the Erewhonians. Her name is an anagram of Grundy (from Mrs Grundy, a character in Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough).

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman who burns books in a futuristic American city. In Montag’s world, firemen start fires rather than putting them out. The people in this society do not read books, enjoy nature, spend time by themselves, think independently, or have meaningful conversations. Instead, they drive very fast, watch excessive amounts of television on wall-size sets, and listen to the radio on “Seashell Radio” sets attached to their ears.

Montag encounters a gentle seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan, who opens his eyes to the emptiness of his life with her innocently penetrating questions and her unusual love of people and nature. Over the next few days, Montag experiences a series of disturbing events. First, his wife, Mildred, attempts suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. Then, when he responds to an alarm that an old woman has a stash of hidden literature, the woman shocks him by choosing to be burned alive along with her books. A few days later, he hears that Clarisse has been killed by a speeding car. Montag’s dissatisfaction with his life increases, and he begins to search for a solution in a stash of books that he has stolen from his own fires and hidden inside an air-conditioning vent.

When Montag fails to show up for work, his fire chief, Beatty, pays a visit to his house. Beatty explains that it’s normal for a fireman to go through a phase of wondering what books have to offer, and he delivers a dizzying monologue explaining how books came to be banned in the first place. According to Beatty, special-interest groups and other “minorities” objected to books that offended them. Soon, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This was not enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions. Beatty tells Montag to take twenty-four hours or so to see if his stolen books contain anything worthwhile and then turn them in for incineration. Montag begins a long and frenzied night of reading.

Overwhelmed by the task of reading, Montag looks to his wife for help and support, but she prefers television to her husband’s company and cannot understand why he would want to take the terrible risk of reading books. He remembers that he once met a retired English professor named Faber sitting in a park, and he decides that this man might be able to help him understand what he reads. He visits Faber, who tells him that the value of books lies in the detailed awareness of life that they contain. Faber says that Montag needs not only books but also the leisure to read them and the freedom to act upon their ideas.

Faber agrees to help Montag with his reading, and they concoct a risky scheme to overthrow the status quo. Faber will contact a printer and begin reproducing books, and Montag will plant books in the homes of firemen to discredit the profession and to destroy the machinery of censorship. Faber gives him a two-way radio earpiece (the “green bullet”) so that he can hear what Montag hears and talk to him secretly.

Montag goes home, and soon two of his wife’s friends arrive to watch television. The women discuss their families and the war that is about to be declared in an extremely frivolous manner. Their superficiality angers him, and he takes out a book of poetry and reads “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. Faber buzzes in his ear for him to be quiet, and Mildred tries to explain that the poetry reading is a standard way for firemen to demonstrate the uselessness of literature. The women are extremely disturbed by the poem and leave to file a complaint against Montag.
Montag goes to the fire station and hands over one of his books to Beatty. Beatty confuses Montag by barraging him with contradictory quotations from great books. Beatty exploits these contradictions to show that literature is morbid and dangerously complex, and that it deserves incineration. Suddenly, the alarm sounds, and they rush off to answer the call, only to find that the alarm is at Montag’s own house. Mildred gets into a cab with her suitcase, and Montag realizes that his own wife has betrayed him.

Beatty forces Montag to burn the house himself; when he is done, Beatty places him under arrest. When Beatty continues to berate Montag, Montag turns the flamethrower on his superior and proceeds to burn him to ashes. Montag knocks the other firemen unconscious and runs. The Mechanical Hound, a monstrous machine that Beatty has set to attack Montag, pounces and injects Montag’s leg with a large dose of anesthetic. Montag manages to destroy it with his flamethrower; then he walks off the numbness in his leg and escapes with some books that were hidden in his backyard. He hides these in another fireman’s house and calls in an alarm from a pay phone.

Montag goes to Faber’s house, where he learns that a new Hound has been put on his trail, along with several helicopters and a television crew. Faber tells Montag that he is leaving for St. Louis to see a retired printer who may be able to help them. Montag gives Faber some money and tells him how to remove Montag’s scent from his house so the Hound will not enter it. Montag then takes some of Faber’s old clothes and runs off toward the river. The whole city watches as the chase unfolds on TV, but Montag manages to escape in the river and change into Faber’s clothes to disguise his scent. He drifts downstream into the country and follows a set of abandoned railroad tracks until he finds a group of renegade intellectuals (“the Book People”), led by a man named Granger, who welcome him.

They are a part of a nationwide network of book lovers who have memorized many great works of literature and philosophy. They hope that they may be of some help to mankind in the aftermath of the war that has just been declared. Montag’s role is to memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes. Enemy jets appear in the sky and completely obliterate the city with bombs. Montag and his new friends move on to search for survivors and rebuild civilization.

A. Burgess - A Clockwork Orange

Explanation of the novel's title
Anthony Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an alleged old Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange".¹ Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human (orang, Malay for "person"). It is possible, however, that Burgess invented the phrase as a play upon the expression "a work of pith and moment".
Burgess wrote in his later (Nov. 1986) introduction, titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state."
In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"², Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.

Point of view from one person
A Clockwork Orange is written in first person perspective from a seemingly biased and unreliable source. Alex never justifies his actions in the narration, giving a good sense that he is somewhat sincere; a narrator who, as unlikeable as he may attempt to seem, evokes pity from the reader through the telling of his unending suffering, and later through his realization that the cycle will never end. Alex's perspective is effective in that the way that he describes events is easy to relate to, even if the situations themselves are not. He uses words that are common in speech, as well as Nadsat, the speech of the younger generation.

Plot summary

Part 1: Alex's world
Set in dystopian 2017, the novel opens with the introduction of protagonist, fifteen-year-old Alex, who, with his gang members (known as "droogs") Dim, Georgie, and Pete, roam the streets at night, committing violent crimes ("ultraviolence") for enjoyment.
Essentially, the first part of the novel is a character study of the protagonist. We learn that Alex and his "droogs" (Russian for friends) have their own language known as Nadsat, and their own hierarchy, in which Alex is the leader. There is a general disregard for the law and for older generations — creating an image of a youth movement that is taking control of this fictional future. (This of course being the exaggeration of the concern that came with the changing values of the 1960s, in which teenagers were becoming decidedly more unruly and rebellious.)
Part 1 involves Alex reflecting on his illegal activity (which involves the rape of two 10-year-old girls, and also the wife of writer F. Alexander). It describes the treachery of his droogs, resulting in Alex's capture and prison sentence for murder.
The use of lyrical language and Nadsat somewhat masks the horrible imagery of Alex's actions, and, to some extent, Alex is able to draw empathy from the reader, through his friendly nature towards his audience (referring to them as his "only friends," and to himself as "Your Humble Narrator," etc.).

Part 2: The Ludovico Technique
After getting caught for his crimes Alex is sentenced to 14 years for murder. Alex gets a job as an assistant to the prison chaplain. He feigns an interest in religion, and amuses himself by reading the Bible for its lurid descriptions of "the old yahoodies (Jews) tolchocking (beating) each other", imagining himself taking part in "the nailing-in" (the Crucifixion of Jesus). Alex hears about an experimental rehabilitation programme called "the Ludovico Technique", which promises that the prisoner will be released upon completion of the two-week treatment, and will not commit crimes afterwards.
Partially by taking part in the fatal beating of a cellmate, Alex manages to become the subject in the first full-scale trial of the Ludovico Technique. The technique itself is a form of aversion therapy, in which Alex is given a drug that induces extreme nausea while being forced to watch graphically violent films for two weeks. Among the films shown are propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, which includes Alex's beloved Beethoven (last movement of the 9th symphony). He pleads them to remove the music, but they refuse to edit it, saying it's "for his own good", and that the music may be the "punishment element". At the end of the treatment, Alex is unable to carry out or even contemplate violent or sexual acts without crippling nausea. He is also unable to listen to classical music without experiencing the same jarring physical reaction.

Part 3: After prison
The third part of the novel concentrates mostly on the following punishment to which Alex is subjected after his treatment. Alex encounters many of his former victims, all of whom seek revenge upon him. He finds himself powerless to defend himself against them, due to feelings of sickness and fear of death, as a reaction to the violence. He finds he has been replaced by a lodger in his home, and wanders into the public library, only to be attacked by an aging old man who he had beaten up with his droogs in chapter one. The police are called by the librarian and when they arrive, he sees that the police are no other than his old 'droog' Dim, and arch enemy Billy Boy. Taking advantage of their positions, they take Alex into a rural part of town to beat him up, and then leave him to his own devices. While looking for solace, Alex falls into the hands of F. Alexander, the husband to the woman whom he earlier raped. Friends of the writer intend to use Alex as a weapon against the political party, exposing the terrible things that have been done to him. Although it is not clear as to whether the friends of F. Alexander intend it, their playing of a symphony by Otto Skadelig below Alex in a locked room drives him to throw himself out of a window instead of enduring the sickness of the treatment's conditioning. Alex's suicide attempt fails, and leads to his being cured, after the bad publicity for the political party that follows.
Touching on themes of the power struggles between old and young generations, the corruption of the police, and also politics, and attempted (but failed) suicide, the third section of the novel is the most reflective of the troubles of future society, mostly shown through the final chapter, where Alex reflects that he and his friends have either been killed (Georgie), fallen victim to the state (Dim's becoming a police officer) or outgrown their destructive behaviour (Pete). Alex finds that he no longer finds pleasure in "ultra-violence" and yearns for a wife and a child of his own. Alex knows that the generation after his will probably be just as destructive, and the one after that,"...and nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. and it would itty (go) on till the end of the world..." — perhaps revealing Burgess's ultimate deliberation on the unruly youth.