Daniel wrote:I feel you Clypheous when it comes to being annoyed by authors ignoring human nature. That's the only plausibility that really bugs me now, not scientific implausibility. Divergent is a particular offender.
I think Devil on my Back did a better job of explaining the compliance than most, since it required a combination of doctored information, distraction, straight up mind control, and hitting people with clubs to keep the system going. Do you agree? What is one that bugged you like that, and how would you tweak it?
I try very hard to suspend disbelief about the science in science fiction worlds, although some of it is just so clearly impossible as to make me a roll my eyes a little (laws of thermo-dynamics making zombies impossible, things like that).
My biggest problems with these books and movies in general is that their societies are built in a way which makes no sense. This isn't an example from this book, but in "The Giver", the book at least, being a "birth mother" job was to have three children, then become a basic drudge worker for the rest of your life. They listed off everyone's career and I thought to myself, at like age 14 or so, "Man, if they do that, 2/3 of women are going to have to be birth mothers to even have population replacement, more if there are accidents or too many 'releases', this just doesn't work".
On back specifically to Devil on my Back, I think that it did do a better job than most of coming up with a system that political science says is realistic. A class that subjugates the lower classes, but keeps them ignorant of the fact that they are actually being repressed. A Brave New World did that with drugs, this does it with access to information. I can certainly imagine a world where everyone had access to wikipedia, but wikipedia was edited for each person so that they would only learn what some leader wanted them to learn. I think that would both be a very simple form of control, and one that would be almost impossible to fight. How would you know if that was happening? How can you prove it's not happening right now in our real world?
Please keep up the great work! You and Paul are now top of my list when I have a podcast to listen to as you talk about all the things that bug the crap out of me about these books but I've never had anyone to talk to about them. Thanks for your efforts and may the random number generator perhaps choose that other guy over there instead of you.
Edit: I completely forgot about my biggest problem with The Hunger Games. If you get something for each "ticket" you have to be drawn for the games it seems like every district should just either put someone up with the best chance of winning, or put up someone who is of no benefit to society and use infinite bread tickets to eliminate poverty. Or just have your own lottery the loser of which has to volunteer as tribute and then you're back exactly where you were, someone gets randomly selected, but you get infinite goodies from the Capitol. I cannot for the life of me come up for a good argument as to why only the first two districts figured this out. OK...I may be done ranting now...