None of this should have happened. If Ty, golden boy, and top student at the Aurora academy hadn’t decided to go for a midnight flight the day before he was supposed to pick his squad. He wouldn’t have seen the distress beacon or found Aurora, a girl who was a passenger on a ship that went missing 200 years ago. If he hadn’t decided to play the hero, he would have had the pick of the top graduates for his team instead he got stuck with the bottom of the barrel.
Daemon wasn’t particularly happy when new neighbors moved in next door. He was even less happy when one of them was a girl his own age. And when that girl ended up being gorgeous? Well, unhappy didn’t really cover his feelings on the situation. He had secrets to keep, namely that he wasn't human. That secret would quickly become far harder to hide if humans moved in next door. He needed to scare her off. If she stuck around, it could hurt him and his sister, but the more time he spent around her the harder it was to stay away.
Jurassic World is a good movie with a decent story. The movie starts off twenty-two years after the original Jurassic Park and introduces a new park full of visitors. Facing a decline in the park, the park’s team of researchers creates hybrid dinosaurs to draw in more visitors. However, this ends up proving disastrous to the park and its visitors.
The Giver is a dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry. The main character, Jonas, lives in a seemingly perfect society where everything is the same and emotions are not experienced. After receiving his assignment as the new receiver, he is exposed to how fragile his community is and the true nature of the world. While training with The Giver, he learns more and more about the past. The harsh reality makes him question how his community works and what they value.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is an insightful, dystopian novel with timeless metaphors. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman whose job is to burn books in a world where literature is prohibited. Montag has never questioned the book burnings and is content with his life, including his boring wife, who spends her days watching her television “family”. Until he meets Clarisse, the unconventional neighbor who leaves Montag with more questions than he can keep up with.
Uglies by Scott Westerfield is a dystopian that follows a girl named Tally Youngblood in a world that revolves around beauty and peer pressure. In Uglyville, everyone undergoes a procedure upon their sixteenth birthday to become “pretty”, which is essentially a cosmetic surgery that imbues traits of conventional attractiveness into the teenagers.
Written in 1993, Parable of the Sower is a piece of speculative fiction that’s set in a post-apocalyptic world of the year 2025. Lauren Olamina is a young African American woman living in a world of constant terror. As California burns due to the effects of climate change and social inequality is at an all time high, Lauren lives in the safe bubble of Robledo, a gated community where she and her family live separately from the chaos outside.
“Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.”
“They had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
