Starting with Sue’s post https://whisperinggums.com/2024/01/06/six-degrees-of-separation-from-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-to/#like-76533 and seeing the versions of other bloggers,

“Now, the usual: Have you read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabriel Zevin. And, regardless, what would you link to?”

I haven’t read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, but from “Goodreads” and Sue, I understand it concerns  “two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design.”  So with that, I’ll go to …

 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline! 
I often enjoy good sci-fi, future fiction and/or dystopian fiction and I’ll have to link Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with  this totally fun bookwhich was made into a pretty good movie (from what I hear/read).

 It’s set somewhere in Oklahoma around the year 2045 where almost everyone lives in old trailers piled on top of each other. Very dystopian. The protagonist is a seriously bright but incredibly poor and orphaned teenager who is a regular denizen of certain sectors of the internet. The internet is provided free of charge to all citizens. In his online community there is a young woman who is also tremendously talented and quite brave and becomes his partner in solving the puzzle. The creator of Meta, a mega-rich recluse, set up the game and their whole internet universe. The kids’ job is to use the clues and find the treasure located somewhere in that universe. There is a huge prize for being the first to find the very well hidden treasure so there are many other people and groups going after it Some of them are deadly serious.. This is a thriller and maybe it’s more for young adults.. 

Next comes Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

This brilliant and completely dystopian tale won the coveted Booker Prize this past year. It’s actually set in  
a slightly future world (maybe by tomorrow) in Gaza or Ukraine but Lynch was inspired by Syria). Ireland has come under the rule of a murderous dictatorial group. Rebel forces oppose the regime and they are hunted and killed on sight. Meanwhile, some families and individuals are trying to get out of the area and they or others are “disappeared.”   

Warning: This is intense.

And Prophet Song brings me to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.  

Here’s a dystopian future no one should miss. Back almost half a century ago, we were all concerned about what kind of information the television sets we were all getting were sending out and to whom, because “Big Brother is Watching.”  And Big Brother doesn’t play games. That was in 1949,I believe.  Poor Winston Smith writes what they call “Newspeak,” a possibly new concept at the time. We know it as “fake news” which seems to be omnipresent today. Paranoia grips Winston at work where he “cleans up” the old archival material so it matches the policies of the current totalitarian regime Home is not much better because his personal television can see him in his apartment – except for one small space where he reads. This is a classic folks and so is my next one: 

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was published about 10 years after Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now it’s for reals, kids – the harbinger of what’s coming soon to a neighborhood, to a world, near you. Carson was the first bonafide scientist to let the public know what was happening to our Earth. This was the pollution, air, water and land, as a result of washing machine detergent, biocides (bug sprays) developed for WWII.  I had heard of this book since I was in high school, probably 9th grade, when my science teacher was just blown away by it. I didn’t read it then but the title and author stuck with me and I got it in 2023. It’s still spot on and beautifully written – I recommend it to all. 
https://mybecky.blog/2023/04/14/silent-spring-by-rachel-carson/

Deconstructing a bit now, I veered off to the opposite of dystopia and came up with my current read, read,  Utopia by Thomas More. This book is the reason we even have the word “Utopia” in our vocabularies. It’s a latin word meaning “no place”  and “dystopia” used much later by John Stuart Mill, means “a place of great suffering or injustice”  per the Oxford Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/dystopia  

And following authors worried about the future, we go back in time to around 1516 when Sir Thomas More, who had apparently been thinking about the world as he and his fellows citizens knew it. He thought about how big it was and what all was being discovered, and where it would all possibly lead. He was very optimistic - either that or disingenuous, satirical.  He wrote a little book which he entitled Utopia. That book doesn’t exactly describe what we in the 21st century would call a Utopia, but now, some 500 years later, it’s a classic. 

I’m giving the book a good reading this week.  🙂   (Sounds like I’m cleaning something – ugh!).  

Finally, because I can’t help myself, we have the dystopia to beat all dystopian fiction with a war between Good and Evil thrown in. Yup – it’s Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a 3+ volume tale of how Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to defeat that “lord” and destroy his ring. .The “Lord” in the title refers to Sauron the maker of chaos and troubles.

And that’s it my book-buds, from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow through a five versions of tomorrow and then all the way back to the darkish, very early Middle Ages of Middle Earth.