Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Worlds I’d Never Want to Live In

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

There are many bookish worlds out there that are quite entertaining to read about but wouldn’t actually be very nice places to live in for all sorts of different reasons. Since I love post-apocalyptic fiction and other dark genres so much, I could have made this list twice as long if I weren’t restricted to only picking ten examples.

1.  England from P.D. James’ The Children of Men. 

While a world without children would be a terrible place to live in general, what made this futuristic version of England truly horrifying was how hopeless it had become. Suicide had become so commonplace and accepted that painless ways of doing it were routinely advertised on television in the film version of this tale. I found that quite disturbing.

2. Panem from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

As if the widespread malnutrition and violence in many of the districts wasn’t dangerous enough, there was also the risk of being sent to your almost-certain death in The Hunger Games every year for the teenage members of this society. There’s no way I’d ever want to live in any of these districts, especially the poorest ones.

3. The entire planet of Earth from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Earth is generally a pretty nice place to live in our universe, but in this book it’s demolished to make room for a galactic freeway very early on in the plot. I was pretty surprised by that twist, and I was only more surprised by what happened afterwards.

4. Winterfell from George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. 

Based on what I’ve read about this series, people regularly died violently in this kingdom. I’m not at all good at sword fighting, so I think my chances of being one of the folks who didn’t survive would be even higher than normal for this world.

5. Oceania from George Orwell’s 1984.

As if living in a brutal and totalitarian society wouldn’t be frightening enough, the dark ending of this book would make me even more scared to go anywhere near Oceania. Let’s just say that their government was so powerful that there was nothing it couldn’t accomplish.

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6. America from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

While it’s never a good idea to live in a country that oppresses human rights, the fact that this futuristic version of the United States banned reading books made me hate it even more than I would have otherwise. I can’t imagine going an entire lifetime without being allowed to read stories.

7. China (and then the entire world!) from Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Granted, zombie apocalypses are never great places to live in general, but what makes this book even more disturbing than the typical example of this genre was how long it took China and the rest of the world to even admit that there was a problem in the first place.

If they’d fought back and freely shared everything they knew about how this infection spread as soon as the dead began to rise, the outbreak probably could have been contained fairly easily.

8. The Greater German Reich from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

In this alternate history novel, The Nazis won World War II and took possession of a massive portion of the United States. Needless to say, life under their regime wasn’t a happy experience for anyone. The Nazis continued to murder people who were Jewish, disabled, part of the LGBT community, and anyone else they decided wasn’t worth keeping alive.

9. Post-apocalyptic Chicago from Veronica Roth’s Divergent. 

Everyone in this world was divided into one of the five different factions of their society depending on that person’s personality and interests.

To be honest with you, none of the factions sounded like good places to live. Some members of their society were deprived of the opportunity to make the simplest choices for themselves like what to wear. Others risked violent deaths ever day for no reason at all. I wouldn’t have wanted to choose any of the five options available to the characters.

10. The army base from M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts. 

As much as I love the idea of a child character who is far more special and dangerous than she first appears to be, the world she lived in was incredibly chaotic. There is no way I would have ever been safe there because there were no safe places left anywhere at all.

What bookish worlds would you never want to live in?