Surprising, no? Well, I still read novels, still a sci-fi nut.

First, of course, just to get it out of the way, allow me to vent for a moment on my latest headache with learning kanji. Okay look at this. AAAARGH! Homophones I was expecting, it's obviously going to happen extremely frequently in a syllable-based system-- actually I could go off on another tangent about phonemes and syllable-based languages but anyway... homophones are not too bad to deal with, they occur even more frequently in Chinese and I can still understand it when spoken, based on context.

The thing is, what is the point of having three different kanji that are not only read the same but mean the same thing? This is not even the worst; the other lookup interface returns three same-definition entries for "baka" (that word should be familiar to anime fans), each written with two kanji, each written with two different kanji! Three pairs of six unique kanji read and mean the same thing! WAAAAT.

Anyway did I mention I love that site, the one I took the screenshot of the kanji lookup dictionary from? I love that site.

And okay, the second two entries for "yume" are marked "non-jouyou," so just knowing the first entry should be fine... still...

On to the original purpose of this entry since that rant took longer than expected!

Today I finished The Beach by Alex Garland. Pretty crazy story. Very interesting... often it seems dystopia and utopia are not at two ends of a spectrum, but are in fact two sides of the same coin. Or maybe not even that. I mean, on the beach here we have a utopia... or is it? And what happens when utopia is threatened? Degenerates into dystopia pretty quickly... or maybe the dystopian parts were there all along and the instabilities just made them obvious. And of course the main question of the book is how far you'd go to preserve utopia, combined with how those attempts to save utopia may conversely destroy it from the inside.

You know something interesting that seems to be a common thread in dystopian literature is that members of society don't care about one another, as such. Like in 1984, you don't think twice if someone disappears (because, after all, they never existed in the first place). In Brave New World you don't have families for one thing, and in the end everything is entertainment, even people. Now, by its nature, BNW doesn't have the government mysteriously killing people or people impoverished and miserable, since that's just not how the society is structured. But other people are hardly treated as actual people, more as so many diversions. Once people aren't interesting anymore, they're abandoned, the way Bernard was.

Then we've got the beach (to clarify, if it's capitalized it's the book, if not it's the setting of the book), where it's different, but you sort of get the same thing. People place the preservation of utopia above other people. Even when things are going wrong most of the members of the beach intentionally maintain the illusion and shut out the people who do not fit.

I really find this interesting especially because it turned up while I was writing 52-pickup, which is in many ways dystopian. This was in an earlier chapter, too, before I'd really drawn the connection. Maybe it shows up so much because it drives at one of our fundamental fears, that we are truly insignificant in the grand workings of the societal Machine. Or perhaps because the devaluation of the individual is seen as a consequence of creating a stable society, where the loss of any one individual will not affect the whole, a cruel but efficient mechanism.

I'm also reading Stranger in a Strange Land and I must say Heinlein is a genius. Brilliant satire. Loving it so far. Er, no deep analysis I'm afraid, but it's a great book and IMO still quite relevant today.