Amazon Review:  A Great Read, January 22, 2001, Reviewer: Morgan Porzsolt from Stockbridge, MI USA

Amazon Review: A very interesting, well written book., December 13, 2001

Reviewer: meg from NJ

This was the first book of Vonnegut's that I have ever read and I found it to be a very well written, interesting book. When I read the description of the book, I did not think I would like it. But once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. Vonnegut does an excellent job of always keeping the reader wondering about what will happen next. I liked how the book had a few different stories that it followed and how they all came together in the end. For me, this added to my curiosity as I was reading because I was trying to figure out how everything tied in together.

This book really got me thinking. Vonnegut wrote it back in 1952 about a world dominated by machines and how people were getting replaced in their jobs by these machines and felt useless, like there was no point to their lives. Today, as technology is advancing, computers are becoming more and more a part of everyday life. Are we headed in the direction of a world dominated by computers? Are we already there?

Lastly, I think Vonnegut did a good job of emphasizing the importance of fighting for what you believe in, no matter how bad the odds are against you. The first half of the book really just built up the feeling of people being dissatisfied with the way things were. The second half of this book really showed what people were doing to try and fix their lives. Although the Ghost Shirt Society may have lost the physical battle against the machines, they still came out winners in the end. They took their chances and stood up for what they believed in.

That's what we learn at the end of the 1973 movie, starring Charlton Heston, where he plays a 21st century detective in (the still overpopulated) New York City. The food supply is Soylent Green, comprised of soybean and lentilOr so the government would have you believe in this guilty pleasure of sci-fi conspiracy cinema.
Almost 20 years later, what seemed like the wildest paranoia on a lazy 70s night at the drive-in somehow doesn't seem quite as far-fetched (though, c'mon, nobody's calling it a documentary).
Source: Green Acres - Is the place to be? By Rhonda Reeves

Who is Harry Harrison?

Author

Soldier and Pacifist

Traveller

Esperantist

Comics Artist and Writer

Anthologist

Atheist

SF Professional

Soylent Green  (by Ralph Melton)

This deck was inspired when Eric Tilton suggested I create a deck around the theme of "Soylent Green." At first, I was tempted to pun on the name and create a Green deck that took over groups with voracious speed. I then had another idea, when the following three facts crossed my mind: France, Canada, and California are all all useful in a Liberal Green deck. France, Canada, and California are all Huge places. The movie Soylent Green was based on a premise of global overpopulation. Voila: a "Soylent Green" deck should start out looking like a normal Green deck, but then pull a surprise victory with Population Reduction.

Group Cards

Al Gore

Anti-Nuclear Activists

California

Canada

Druids

EPA

France

Green Party

Lama Ramadingdong

Rosicrucians

Science Alarmists

Plot Cards

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Back to the Salt Mines x2

Benefit Concert x2

Combined Disasters

Crop Circles

Drought x2

Flesh-Eating Bacteria

Good Polls

Hat Trick

Hoax

Hubble Trouble

Martial Law x2

Nuclear Accident

Oil spill x2

Save the Whales x3

Savings and Loan Scam

Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know

Goal: Population Reduction x2

NWO: Global Warming x3

NWO: Military-Industrial Complex

Working on the text: Extrapolating present-day problems and trend

Examples:  a) Scarce Water Supplies - Fiction and Reality (Harrison: Make Room! Make Room!)

Excerpt 1 from Make Room!

"Just bad the orders from the sergeant, all points closed for twenty-four hours. The reservoir level is low because of the drought, they gotta save water."

"That s a hell of a note," Andy said, looking at the key still in the lock. "I m going on duty now and this means I m not going to be drinking for a couple of days ...."

After a careful look around, the policeman unlocked the door and took one of the jerry cans from Andy. "One of these ought to hold you." He held it under the faucet while it filled, then lowered his voice. "Don't let it out, but the word is that there was another dynamiting job on the aqueduct upstate."

Those farmers again?"

"It must be. I was on guard duty up there before I came to this precinct and it's rough, they just as soon blow you up with the aqueduct at the same time. Claim the city's stealing their water."

  Selling Water to Texas Cities is Risky Business

Excerpt 2 from Make Room!

Excerpt 1 from Brave New World

[Foster] explained the system of labelling–a T for the males, a circle for the females and for those who were destined to become freemartins a question mark, black on a white ground.

New Birth Control

As Seen On Eyewitness News

Dec. 27, 99 -- Women, how'd you like to avoid having a period every month?

Pam Bauer: "That would be fabulous. Nobody likes to have their period. It's a pain in the neck."

 You may not have to suffer as often. Dr. Gary Hodgen of East Virginia Medical School is studying a new birth control pill it's called Seasonale. It's taken for 84 consecutive days, then stopped to allow a regular period for seven days.

 Dr. Gary Hodgen, Researcher: "If this is done as a regimen throughout a year, there would be only four times to bleed per year."

That's right, just four times a year. And wehave the hormones to do it.

Dr. Gary Hodgen: "These things are already here, but they're not in a specific product designed and approved as Seasonale will be."

Some people worry that taking the pill for so many consecutive days and then having fewer periods may be risky but Hodgen says for most women it would be safe since for them, the hormones are not dangerous.

Dr. Gary Hodgen: "That gives us confidence that it will be safe, not toxic, well tolerated and will get a good result."

Some experts say the new pill might actually provide some health benefits; less bleeding means less anemia, it means less pain from fibroids and endometriosis. More study is clearly needed.

If the FDA approves the new pill, it may be appropriate for use by thirty million women.

Excerpt 2 from Brave New World

"In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopædia ..."

And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives.

"The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction ..."

Character Constellation in Context:

a) Mustapha Mond and the Savage [Brave New World – Aldous Huxley]

Theoretical Considerations and Reading Lists

Utopia: The Best of All Possible Worlds?

In the 16th century, Thomas More coined the word for the title of a political work, from Greek, meaning "no place" and described an imaginary society. We'll discuss this and similar works and films set in alien worlds, by writers such as Bellamy, Morris, Orwell, Skinner, and by various movie directors. We'll argue the question whether their settings are overly optimistic, pessimistic, or whether they could and should be realized. We might also try to construct a vision of our own, for an ideal and perhaps possible world. Readings and discussion. 2 papers. No exams: this is a seminar.

Definition of "utopia" (literally: nowhere) [Gk. ou 'no' + topos 'place']

Webster's Dictionary: 1: an imaginary and indefinitely remote place 2: a place of ideal perfection esp. in laws, government, and social conditions 3: an impractical scheme for social improvement.

Novels, Stories, etc.:

Thomas More, Utopia (1516). Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044165-4

Samuel Butler, Erehwon (1872). Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-043057-1

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). Signet Classic. 0-451-52412-8

William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890). Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-043115-2

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932). HarperPerennial. 0-06-080983-3

Isaac Azimov, I, Robot (1940-50). Bantam Books. 0-553-29438-5

George Orwell, 1984 (dystopia, 1949). Signet Classic. 0-451-52493-4

The Bill of Rights (Amendments I-X to the U.S. Constitution, 1791).

Poetry:

Some utopian and dystopian films--alphabetical by title:

SF Novel/SF Film

Arthur C. Clarke. The Lost Worlds of 2001 [1972]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. xv + 240p.

Peter George. Dr. Strangelove [1963]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. 176p.

Harry Harrison. Make Room! Make Room! [1966]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. xii + 213p.

Robert A. Heinlein. Destination Moon [1950]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. xiii + 176p.

Richard Matheson. The Shrinking Man. [1956]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. xxvi + 192p.

W.J. Stuart. Forbidden Planet [1956]. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. 208p.

1/7/2000 - Coming Up Next: The End Of The World, by Jeremy Geltzer. So you're disappointed that the end of the world didn't arrive when clocks rolled over to January 1, 2000. While we can't offer you the apocalypse now, we can recommend some classic visions of future shock. Film pioneer Georges Melies imagined A Trip to the Moon in 1902, but it was Fritz Lang who first envisioned the future on an epic scale in Metropolis (1926). The year is 2026; while wealthy industrialists lounge in their rooftop pleasure gardens, workers slave 10-hour works days (a prediction that's not too far wrong). William Cameron Menzies' vision of Things To Come (1936) saw the scourge of war setting mankind back to the Dark Ages. When civilization is rebuilt, it becomes clear that mankind has sacrificed humanity for impersonal technology. As email and the internet become standard tools, Menzies' film also seems prescient. In the wake of WW II, film prophecies only saw bleak doomsday dramas, such as Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), in which Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins are the only humans to survive nuclear annihilation. We can only home the meek that inherit the Earth have so much star power. By the 1960s, future-flicks had once again become preachy passion plays. In The Time Machine (1960), brutish subterranean Morlocks breed blonde haired, blue eyed Elois for food stuffs. Horrific food shortages also underlie the world of Soylent Green (1973). Charlton Heston, who's famous line revealed the plot of Soylent Green ("It's made from people!"), was returning back to the future; he had been there before in The Planet of the Apes (1968), a thriller that imagined a totalitarian society of simians. Violent visions of oppressive regimes dominated Truffuat's Fahrenheit 451 (1967), where books are outlawed; Logan's Run (1976), where human life is snuffed out at the age of 30 to control overpopulation; and Brazil (1985), Terry Gillian's skewed prophecy of a world where terrorist bombings are a daily event. More optimistic imaginations have conjured up realms of floating cars, anti-gravity devices and phaser/laser sidearms, but audiences over eight decades seem to agree that a dark, foreboding future is much more interesting. Y2K didn't set us back to the Dark Ages this January 1…but then again, the real millenium begins on January 1, 2001. So just wait another 350 or so days…