V for Vendetta

Written by: Alan Moore and David Lloyd

First line: Good evening, London. It's 9 o'clock and this is the voice of Fate broadcasting on 275 and 285 in the medium wave. 

Why you should read this book, in a dismal post-World War III future, England has fallen under the sway of brutal fascism, with an Orwellian cameras in every crevice and party propaganda broadcast from every corner. A shadowy anarchist known only as V wages a rather effective one-man war against the symbols of the government and the men and women who run it, while teaching a young woman named Evey his philosophy of self-rule and death to tyrants. With every resource of the country devoted to his death, V carries out an elaborate plan to hand power back to the people before his enemies catch up with him.

Why you shouldn't read this book: While I'm obviously very opposed to fascism and in support of anything that opposes fascism, reading this book 35 years after its original publication and maybe 25 years after the first time I read it, it feels kind of overblown, like an child's fantasy about Batman saving the world.

Decelerate Blue

Written by: Adam Rapp and Mike Cavallaro

First line: So that's where is happened.

Why you should read this book: Angela lives in a dystopian nightmare where speed and capitalism merge to form a horrific reality for people who want to relax and enjoy themselves from time to time doing things besides running in place, shopping at the Megamall, and watching time-saving fourteen-minute movies. When she learns that her grandfather is being sent to a reduction colony for being too slow, she ends up being drawn into the Underground, a secret society of people who use as many adjectives as they like, play slow music, and stare at the world's most relaxing cow for fun. Angela finds love and hope for the future, but becoming a member of this new society and ending the reign of terror in the rest of the world entails more than simply running away. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You think brevity is the soul of everything. 

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Written by: Karen Lord

First line: He always set aside twelve days of his annual retreat to finish reports and studies, and that left twelve more for everything else.

Why you should read this book: This provocative far-future speculative fiction novel sees a low-level civil servant scientist, Grace Delarua, thrust onto a deeply meaningful year-long diplomatic mission to help displaced people, including the reserved, always-appropriate Dllenahkh, survey the human resources of their new home. Following the destruction of their own planet, where most Sadiri women lived, the survivors settle on Cygnus Beta, and must determine how best to preserve their genetic and cultural heritage; specifically they need to start getting married to non-Sadiris and popping out the babies before they get testosterone poisoning and stop behaving appropriately, but since they're basically Vulcans, this is easier said than done. Meanwhile, Grace, Dllenahkh, and their team are about to come face to face with numerous hidden truths about Cygnus Beta, the nature of reality, and the meaning of love. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: There's so much world building and so many characters and so many plot points that I couldn't always keep score, and it seemed to me that not every question was answered by the end of the book.

Venus Plus X

Written by: Theodore Sturgeon

First line: "Charlie Johns," urgently cried Charlie Johns: "Charlie Johns, Charlie Johns!" for that was the absolute necessity—to know who Charlie Johns was, not to let go of that for a second, for anything, ever.

Why you should read this book: Charlie Johns, an average, twentieth century man,  wakes up to find he has been inexplicably summoned to a seemingly utopian, technologically advanced future where gender doesn't exist and all people therefore live in perfect harmony. The Ledom, presumptive inheritors of an Earth destroyed by careless homo sapiens, want Charlie to know them, their culture and customs, and to offer up his honest opinion of their civilization, so that they may better know themselves. With wide-eyed wonder tinged with a yearning for home, Charlie agrees to a complete tour of paradise, down to its greatest secrets, while a parallel story interspersed with Charlie's journey offers up a picture of flawed egalitarianism in a modern (1960) nuclear family.

Why you shouldn't read this book: While Sturgeon was, in so many ways, ahead of his time, he was also, like the rest of us, a product of his time; I'd like to believe that our understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender has advanced substantially in the last 60 years.

FTL, Y'all! Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive

Edited by: C. Spike Trotman and Amanda LaFrenais

First line: Mornin'

Why you should read this book: It's a graphic anthology featuring nineteen short comic stories linked by the common theme of a near-future reality in which anyone with $200 and an internet connection can build a faster-than-light drive and explore the cosmos. There are heroes, villains, aliens, overworked moms, and hapless researchers, in a world that is much larger than our own, but still features elements the human race will not likely outgrow for a while: misogynistic internet trolls, unpleasant airport experiences,  heroic rescues, teenagers searching for themselves, liars, loneliness, idiots, geniuses, and bad parenting. Also, due to the nature of the technology, basically any vessel can be a starship, so there are some hilarious looking starships.

Why you shouldn't read this book: While connected by the theme of the $200 warp drive, there's no further continuity to the stories, so they don't actually feel like they're all set in the same world.

Ancillary Justice

Written by: Ann Leckie

First line: The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around in.

Why you should read this book: Breq has a secret: she is not human, but the last remnant of a massive, two thousand year old artificial intelligence once controlled by a colonialist space empire, and Breq has a bone to pick with that empire. She doesn't understand why she's wasting her time rescuing Seivarden Vendaai, an officer who's hit hard times after a thousand years in cryostorage, but together they make their way through a dangerous universe, with Breq's unwavering focus on her goal pushing her forward to the next danger. The plot jumps back and forth between Breq's present day (far future) journey and the events of the last thousand years that precipitated her disenchantment with the culture that created her.

Why you shouldn't read this book: The world-building is so complex that it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on and to get into the story, and I'm still not one hundred percent sure what the author is trying to do with gender here, even though it's clearly significant.

Patternmaster

Written by: Octavia Butler

First line: Rayal had his lead wife, Jansee, with him on that last night.

Why you should read this book: I just realized that the final novel in this story arc was the first book that Butler wrote and published, that none of the other books in the series were written in the chronological order that they were presented, and that there's actually a fifth book that sort of goes with the others but is also wholly unrelated, which Butler never allowed to be reprinted because she wasn't proud of it, but from a creative writing perspective, this is the last story in the Patternist series, about a young man who doesn't think he has any desire for power, but is forced to gather it in retaliation against an older brother who will destroy him to keep the power for himself. Teray values his freedom above all else and has carefully arranged his life to ensure that he doesn't end up in the sort of mental bondage that is all-too-common among moderately strong psychics in his extremely hierarchical world. His jealous brother, Coransee, refuses to take Teray's word that his will not stand in Coransee's way, beginning a power struggle that forces the younger, less experienced man to grow up very quickly.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Some of the casual human bondage stuff is kind of disturbing; no one in this book has any rights.

Clay's Ark

Written by: Octavia Butler

First line: The ship had been destroyed.

Why you should read this book: An astronaut, infected with an alien parasite that offers superhuman strength and abilities to those who survive the initial infection, returns to earth with full knowledge of his disease but unable to defy the biological imperative that the disease presents: to infect as many people as possible and to procreate often. Part of Eli knows that, for the sake of humanity, he should die, but somehow he ends up infecting an entire family and creating a new species of human being, with the intention of containing the outbreak to a limited and isolated population. But the disease demands more hosts, some of whom are determined to escape captivity and seek medical treatment, which, as Eli knows, will mean that humanity stands little chance against this invasion.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Although this novel present a key story arc in the Patternist series, it completely leaves Doro's experiment and the Patternists behind as it explores this other evolutionary path.

On a Clear Day

Written by: Walter Dean Myers

First line: "She just stopped singing."

Why you should read this book: Extrapolating from the world of today, Myers imagines a future in which corporations control every aspect of existence, smilingly introducing new products and services while the stratification between the haves and have-nots increases. Dahlia, an orphan math prodigy, is recruited by a group of young people who still feel like they can make a difference, and somehow, they are able to throw a monkey wrench into one high-stakes machination. Sort of grim, and following the new YA aesthetic of books about terrible futures in which an even more terrible future is inevitable, despite everything that the characters do to change the outcome.

Why you shouldn't read this book: To be honest, I didn't really understand big swaths of it, why people were doing what they were doing and how they came to their information and connections, even though the books explained it; the explanations just didn't make sense to me, and having one character state that she will turn facts into data and enter them into computer projections to predict outcomes didn't really mean much to me either. Too many characters, too much plot.