@ kalex:

I can’t think of any novel that got this right, unless it was done as a parody.

@ Dr, Azrael Tod:

Oh wow… That’s harsh. There is nothing worse than a book which gets ruined by it’s own author who is hell bent on reconning everything into something retarded.

My all-time-favorite book “Azrael” by Wolfgang Hohlbein (a german mainstream-author, who writes an astonishing amount of crappy, repetitive books, but every once in a while there is on really great amongst them) got not just nearly repeated in its part 2, its meaning got even turned around from mind control via drugs towards something about angels that could be called. It gave my favorite book a completely different meaning.

That doesn’t even mean that i think of Azrael 2 as a bad book, but it ruined the storry of both.

I’ve always been attracted to retellings of stories I knew and loved, and always been disappointed by them, too. Ever since I watched the Simpsons episode “Trilogy of Error”, which was the only time I’ve seen the different perspective concept done right.

Any experience with novels that have pulled this off?

P.S. I’m a fan of these avatars.

@ astine:

Yep, I agree. And for the record, I abhor the stories about danger of scientific hubris. :)

I guess the redeeming quality of Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood is that the apocalypse and human extinction event at the end of both books is brought about not by the corporate greed, but by the zealotry of the enviro-nuts who are convinced human species needs to be rebooted in order to save the planet from environmental collapse. She is not demonizing just corporations – religious groups and environmental extremists are also painted in unfavorable light.

I really think that the world depicted in these books could have pulled out of the nose dive if they were given enough time. The corps were more or less on a fast track for singularity event which would likely help to resolve a lot of the inequality issues.

As for female characters – I think part of it is the “Smurfette Principle”. Most entertainment targeted at young boys follows a similar pattern. You will have a large cast of characters, nearly all of which are male. All of them have defining characteristics – there is the smart one, the strong one, the vain one, the funny one, etc… And then there is the token female, whose defining characteristic is that she is a girl and she does girly stuff. “Girl” is her personality trait.

I see this all over – cartoon series, movies, muppet shows, books, comics, etc.. Most of us grow up without ever having positive fictional female role models we could look up to, because women in the media we consume hardly ever have personalities, and are almost always relegated to sidekick/background character roles. We get so used to this, that we don’t actually notice this is a problem until someone points it out to us.

Oh, with regard to the strong female characters…

So many of them are so bad because so many of them are written by men. It’s hard to write for someone to whom you can’t relate. Men just don’t have the right upbringings or glands to appreciate problems from the perspective of women. (It goes in the other direction as well, just read Frankenstein and tell me is Dr Frankenstein doesn’t seem strangely effeminate…)

Heinlein was a libertarian; he didn’t mean for Starship Troopers to be a fascist apology. That said, I do agree with you, Luke, that one should be able to enjoy an interesting story told from an opposing point of view without getting upset at the opposing point of view.

These ‘corporations are evil’ stories are so common that it’s basically a trope, however. It’s like reading a story about the dangers of scientific hubris. In fact, a lot of the time, they’re the same story. (case in point: Resident Evil) I tend to think that they are usually a bit simplistic in how they portray the threats that super large corporations pose to democracy and ironically the free market. There’s so much that can be said and so many authors have this cartoonish understanding of how business works.

That said, corporate dystopias tend to be beat your standard pseudo-marxist, totalitarian state dystopia.

@ Andrew Zimmerman:

Just to clarify, I wasn’t really making any political statements here. I choose to read Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood as works of SF that explore certain dystopian “what if” scenario – namely breakdown of traditional government, and ascendancy of a corporate feudalism. To me this is just an interesting scenario – I can’t help it, I like dystopian settings for some reason. I like books that explore the human condition after the fall of civilization as we know it. This is just one of many potential scenarios that tickle my imagination. The fact that it politically aligns with certain liberal value sets is besides the point entirely.

Sometimes you just have to turn off your political value meter and enjoy the work of fiction for what it is. Hell, the fact that I enjoyed Heinlein’s Starship Troopers does not mean I agree in the pseudo-fascist ideology he based his space faring society around.

Granted, I can sort of see how someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum could read these two Atwood’s books and rage. I recently found out that Dan Simmons wrote sort of an opposite of this – a post apocalyptic dystopia in which he blames the downfall of the country on liberal progressives and I was a bit off-put by that. But again – perhaps I will check it out, and read it with my political-bullshit-meater turned off just to see how the other side views things. :)

Despite all major political outlets screaming liberal propaganda against my country I keep in mind the simple fact that the US people and corporations actually donate more money to the poor than any government program ever invented in the world. And that is a fact not taught by people who come here and want to bitch about people who choose to not take advantage of our already socialized education system.

What better but to carry an individual from cradle to grave? Even then it wouldn’t be good enough for our socialized, institutionalized, educated and wonderful news democrats.

I have a strong sensation our Polish friend has been brainwashed