Dystopian Novels

"When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain. “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”"

"A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse."

"And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them. “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?” The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?” “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.” “Tokyo? Who told you that?” Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…” “Tell us” the dinosaur said. So Rydell did."

"His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants."

"The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough."

"“Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”"

"She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth."

"They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television."

"Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met."

"Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum."

"Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit."

"Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System. “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response. “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.” And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts. The Russians’ mouths were open… “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.” But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard."

"Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there."

"The upper classes, for fear of the duties, very largely stopped passing money from one generation to another upon death. The established practice was for grandparents, while still alive, to transfer property not so much to their children as to their grandchildren for the purchase of a privileged education."

"The egalitarian doctrine that any man can be trained to substitute for any other was so deeply rooted that our ancestors only slowly came to appreciate the full significance of the one simple fact: that all professions are competing with each other for a limited supply of intelligence."

"Exceptional brains require exceptional teaching....."

"As Sir Hartley Shawcross said in 1956 – ‘I do not know of a single member of the Labour Party, who can afford to do so, who does not send his children to a public school, often at great sacrifice – not for snobbish reasons or to perpetuate class distinction, but to ensure his children get the best’."

"There was no harm in the public schools imparting a superior education - it was all to the good; what was wrong was that the privileged were chosen by other criteria than merit. They were selected by their parents' bank accounts."

"The private schools, less at home in the world of industry, technology, and science, gave too much attention to Athens and too little to the atom."

"Our grandfathers did not fully realize that promotion of adults on merit, with all that it implied for industrial organization, was as necessary as promotion of children on merit."

"As men became more like machines, machines became more like men, and when machines were built to mimic people, the ventriloquist at last understood himself."

"The internal class system was eventually changed by the international class system with which Englishmen were likewise obsessed – for ever discussing whether their country was a first-class power, or (after some setback) second-class, third-class, or no class at all. At the beginning of the last century the fear was of Germany; in the middle years, of American and, even more, of Russian competition; at the end, of the Chinese."

"At the beginning of my special period, 1914, the upper classes had their fair share of geniuses and morons, so did the workers; or, I should say, since a few brilliant and fortunate working men always climbed up to the top despite having been subordinate in society, the inferior classes contained almost as high a proportion of superior people as the upper classes themselves. Intelligence was distributed more or less at random."

"As members of a particular family, they want their children to have every privilege. But at the same time they are opposed to privilege for anyone else’s children. They desire equal opportunity for everyone else’s children, extra for their own."

"Civilisation does not depend upon the stolid mass, the homme moyen sensuel, but upon the creative minority, the innovator who with one stroke can save the labour of 10,000, the brilliant few who cannot look without wonder, the restless elite who have made mutation a social, as well as biological, fact. The ranks of scientists and technologists, the artists and the teachers, have been swelled, their education shaped to their high genetic destiny, their power for good increased. Progress is their triumph; the modern world their monument."

"Every selection of one is a rejection of the many."

"....and here no lesson has been more simple, and yet more painful, to learn that the fact of genetic inequality."

"Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy* of talent."

"If all went to orphanages, all would have equal opportunity, true, but at the cost of making everyone equally unhappy."

"The flaw is that intelligent people tend, on the whole, to have less intelligent children than themselves; the tendency is for there to be a continuous regression towards the mean – stupid people bearing slightly more clever children as surely as clever people have slightly less."

"'Intelligence' is as much a qualification for power in the modern state as 'breeding' was in the old. The stress on this sort of ability was produced by a century of wars and threats of war, in which the kind of occupational achievement which raised the national war-potential was lauded above all else; but, say the theorists, now that the threat is no longer so immediate, can we not encourage a diversity of values?"

"When the basic injustice was remedied, and the intelligent from every class were given their full opportunities, those who would have been enemies of the established order become its strongest defenders."

"The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man."

"One of the symptoms of rampant ambition was the upgrading by name alone of occupations which could not be upgraded in any other way. We no longer have to be so hypocritical. We can recognize inferiority and dare to label it so. But in those days rat-catchers were called ‘rodent officers’, sanitary inspectors ‘public health inspectors’, and lavatory cleaners ‘amenities attendants’."

"The great dilemma of industrial society is that ambition is aroused, in lesser measure but still aroused, in the minds of stupid children and their parents as well as in the minds of the intelligent. This is inevitable since no one has been able to foresee with complete accuracy where ability is going to sprout. Everyone has to be ambitious so that no one with talents of a high order shall fail to make use of them. When ambition is crossed with stupidity it may do nothing besides foster frustration."

"We need ample holidays - history shows that scientists have often hit upon the missing link in a chain of thought quite unexpectedly when they were basthing in the sea, walking in the mountains or drowsing by the Caribbean."

"The top of today are breeding the top of tomorrow to a greater extent than at any time in the past. The elite is on the way to becoming hereditary; the principles of heredity and merit are coming together."

"The success of open competition in government employment established the principle that the most responsible posts should be filled by the most able people; the Pioneers that the least responsible jobs should be filled by the least able people. In other words, a society in which power and responsibility were as much proportioned to merit as education."

"The flower of that experiment of the 1940s was the Pioneer Corps. When this indispensable body of hewers and drawers was confined to men with IQs below the line required to get them into the Intelligence Corps, the rise in efficiency was spectacular. The morale of these dull-witted men was better. They were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with. They were amongst equals – they had more equal opportunities since they had more limited ones – and they were happier, had fewer mental breakdowns, and were harder working. The Army had learnt the lesson of the schools: that people can be taught more easily, and get on better, when they are classed with people of more or less equal intelligence, or lack of it."

"Men, after all, are notable not for the equality, but for the inequality of their endowment. Once all the geniuses are amongst the elite, and all the morons amongst the workers, what meaning can equality have? What idael can be upheld except the principle of equal status for equal intelligence? What is the purpose of abolishing inequalities in nurture except to reveal and make more pronounced the inescapable inequalities of Nature?"

"As for the lower classes, their situation is different too. Today all persons, however humble, know they have every chance. They are tested again and again. If on one occasion they are off-colour, they have a second, a third and fourth opportunity to demonstrate their ability. But if they have been labelled 'dunce' repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering, reflection. Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status - not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they are inferior? For the first time in human history the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard."

"Hence one of our characteristic modern problems: some members of the meritocracy, as most moderate reformers would admit, have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern, and so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended."

"People of low intelligence have sterling qualities: they go to work, they are conscientious, they are dutiful to their families. But they are unambitious, innocent, and incapable of grasping clearly enough the grand design of modern society to offer any effective protest."

"Parental selfishness had to be socialized - that is, made subordinate to the interests of society. Parents had to be educated to understand it was a sin to seek high positions for stupid children – if they did so, the advantage of the community would be sacrificed to the selfish interests of one small family amongst many."

"One thing the regional centres could not do. They could not measure the qualities of character expressed in effort expended by an employee in the course of his work. Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I+E=M). The lazy genius is not one."

"The future development of children could not be accurately assessed at the tender age of 11. The strain upon parents and children of the competitive examination was too great. Once children were shepherded into the separate pens it was too difficult for those who developed late to transfer from one to another. Their chief interest was not, however, so much educational as social; the left-wingers claimed that to segregate the clever from the stupid was to deepen class divisions. They proposed that all children, irrespective of sex, race, creed, class (that was all right but they went on) or ability, should be lumped together."

"The idealists were backed by the discontented, people who had suffered from the judgement of educational selection, and were just intelligent enough to be able to focus their resentment on some limited grievance, the streaming of infant schools, the eleven plus exam, the smaller classes in grammar schools, or whatever it might happen to be. They were backed by parents whose children were allotted, in all fairness to everyone’s eyes except their own, to secondary modern schools; and frustrated adults who blamed their own schooling for later disappointments, and wanted to deprive others too of the chances which they felt themselves had missed."

"The schools would have failed to fulfil one of their essential purposes in a progressive class system; they would not have been society's escalators for the gifted."

"Till the middle of the century practical socialists identified equality with advancement for merit. The trouble started when the left wing emphasized a different interpretation of equality, and, ignoring differences in human ability, urged that everyone, those with talent as well as those without, should attend the same schools and receive the same basic education."

"Upper-class parents with dull children did everything possible to hide their handicap. They usually made up by their own frantic determination for any lack of will on the part of the children. For instance, they bought places at private schools which would never have been awarded on merit. They spent, for the sake of stimulus, even more on books and travel than other rich people. And, when the combined pressure of home and school produced, as it often did, a person superficially not too dull, the parents eased the loved one into a cosy corner of one of the less exacting professions, such as law or stockbroking."