New Science Fiction: Why Me?, 1987
By David Walls-Kaufman
In 1984 they arrested me.
In 1987 I got out of reeducation.
I didn’t actually learn anything in reeducation. Of course I could repeat by rote every lesson they “taught” me. It isn’t teaching. It is hearing the same things over and over. Until you cringe in all your being against anything different.
But me, I was overhandled past terror, to numbness. I really don’t care. Yes, I learned my lesson. But I also understand them now and know they have nothing to fear from me because I am broken by the experience of how cunning they are. I know they are reading these writings, these scratchings. I leave them out for them to find.
Fiction From the LI Archive: There Are No Regrets in Skyview Tower
By Pierre Comtois
Editor’s note: today’s fiction from the archive is published because of a request from a contributor in the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. This story was originally published at Liberty Island on April 21, 2014.
Stoney Vander sighed heavily as he gazed outside over the municiplex. It was an unusually clear day and for that reason, he was able to see the foundations upon which Skyview Tower had been built and in the distance, between neighboring towers, the hint at the green wild beyond the point where civilization ended and unsupervised nature began.
What was out there? Wondered Stoney Vander.
According to the Board of Supervisors, there was nothing but unsupervised nature, a wilderness of tangled vines and creepers, thick forests of trees whose branches swept the ground and whipped their leaves in the wind, swamps of disease ridden water, and matted grasslands woven with ground crawling thorns and infested with biting, stinging insects of every kind.
Just the thought of it all sent shivers down Stoney Vander’s spine… shivers of anticipation, that is. The truth was, he often found himself like this; instead of working or studying, his attention was drawn to the ’s expansive window banks and the green wild when it was visible on clear days. The view never failed to send his mind wandering down paths other citizens of the town of Sunshine would surely consider perverse. But why was it perversion to think of life outside Skyview Tower? What was wrong with feeling the wind on your bare flesh instead of the tower’s climate controlled atmosphere or to breath air unfiltered by its ventilation systems?
Dystopian Movies Head-to-Head: 4 Reasons Why ‘Equals’ Beats ‘Equilibrium’
By Tamara Wilhite
On the surface, Equals and Equilibrium have the same premise. Humanity had a horrible war. Emotion itself was blamed, so it is outlawed. In Equilibrium, everyone takes mandatory medication to suppress emotion but is otherwise normal. In Equals, it is implied they do something at birth to suppress emotions, though the process fails periodically. In both societies, there is a totalitarian system that seeks to find the deviants and gets in the way of a couple falling in love. While Equilibrium is a bigger budget film with far more action, I think Equals beats it in a variety of ways.
