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In Kingdom of Without, Andrea Tang pens a story about socioeconomic class differences and the challenges that those in the lower classes face just to survive. To tell her story, Tang creates an allegory that bumps up against truth and gives the reader ample food for thought. Set in Beijing, nearly 150 years since General Yuan Shikai successfully declared himself the Emperor of China in 1915, the story opens in the Sixth Ring, where a seventeen-year-old street urchin is getting new prosthetics from Ge Rong. An art and engineering savant who is talented not only with biohacks, Ge Rong engineers tools and techniques for aRead More →

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley gets a major update with The Block by Ben Oliver. In Oliver’s second book in The Loop Trilogy targeted for young adults, readers will experience a video game vibe, like that achieved in The Matrix. Along with the characters, they will wonder what is real and what is simulated. In this new dystopian world, everybody’s happy because Happy—an artificial intelligence—rules the world.  Galen Rye is in charge, and he decides who suffers as a battery—without hopes, dreams, and ambitions as they power the world with their energy harvested from pain, fear, and anger.  He decides who should be brainwashed intoRead More →

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Readers of science fiction or dystopian literature like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy will likely find fascination in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s inaugural young adult novel, The Summer Prince.  For her story’s setting, Johnson has created Palmares Três, a dream city which rose from the ruins of a world ravaged by plague, war, and destruction.  The city is governed mostly by women since men have done so much to destroy the world with their war games and power plays.  To keep the world from ever dying again, the Queen of Palmares Três creates a composite of the best that the previous world had to offer,Read More →