Final Choice Novel blog

          The dystopian choice novel I chose was The Running Man by Stephen King, which was a book about a future society in 2025 where a new form of entertainment in the form of game shows has become very popular. The game shows involve people risking their life for large amounts of money. The main character who is named Ben Richards, is participating in a competition known as the running man, in which he is pursued by a group of professional killers called the hunters. While running from the hunters Ben Richards discovers that the government has been hiding the truth about increases in air pollution which has risen to extremely dangerous levels in recent years. This air pollution has caused a breakout of deadly cardio-pulmonary diseases, which they have labeled as “asthma” to the public. The way the story was resolved surprised me, because instead of Ben Richards unveiling the secrets the government hid from the public to the world, like the reader might predict, it ends with him learning that his wife and daughter were killed by a mob that believed that Ben Richards was a criminal and then hijacks a jet and crashes it into the game associations headquarters.
         I thought that this ending was slightly unsatisfactory because you never find out how or if the problem was resolved like you do in most novels. One thing that surprised me about this book is why Ben Richards chose to blame the games association about his family’s deaths instead of the mob that killed them. Indirectly, it was the games associations fault for spreading propaganda to the public telling them that Ben Richards was a criminal which caused the mobs anger towards Ben Richards. It confused me that after Ben Richards learned his family was dead the author described him as in a delirium but he still seemed capable of planning his hijacking of the plane, and also put thought into who’s fault he believed his families deaths were. I also thought it was odd that he was capable of piloting the plane after hijacking it, even though the book never mentioned that he had any ability to fly one.

Utopia blog

The Utopian society me and my group created for the Utopian society project was called the Gouda Ghetto. Our society was completely based around genetically modified plants that instead of growing wood or fruit grow cheese. The cheese is used for everything from eating to building and has allowed our society to rise above its neighbors to become a utopia. It is isolated from the rest of the world by the Swiss Sea and the montery jack mountains, and has grown a powerful military to defend itself with. Cheese has even become part of the society’s culture, and is used to define social classes.

One of the problems we faced while creating our society was if we would have other food sources outside of cheese. We eventually decided that we would also have vegetable, poultry, and cattle farms along with our farms for growing out modified cheese plants. This way we could widen our ability to produce food in one source failed, and increase our ability to trade with other societies. Another problem we faced was what other than cheese we would utilize as building materials. Eventually we decided we could mine and trade for various metals to strengthen our structures and build our military weapons out of. The final major problem we faced was how to keep the cheese that our buildings were made of from rotting. We decided that we would build tubes within the cheese buildings that contain Freon, and the climate of the region we live in stayed at a relatively low temperature all year round. We also used a sealant on the cheese that kept air from flowing in and out of it freely.

            My group and I also had focus questions about our military and food production. We decided to have a strong military that we would use only for the defense of our society. All of our citizens own and are trained to use weapons in case we are attacked by a neighboring country. We found that it was very easy to cover our second focus question about food production. Our society contains many farms that grow a variety of foods, primarily the modified cheese plants. We have an entire class in society devoted to working on farms, which make up the majority of our economy.

choice book

          For my choice book I read the Running Man by Stephen King. In the story, which takes place in the year 2025, a new form of entertainment has arisen that consists of game shows that people risk their lives in to win huge amounts of money. The main character Ben Richards has signed up for a game show known as the running man to win money to help his daughter who is fatally ill. The running man is a game show in which a person is on the run from an elite group who is trained to track the contestant down. Throughout the contest the contestant is portrayed as a criminal to the public to avoid people helping them. Throughout the book, Ben Richards discovers many secrets that the government and game association has kept secret from the public, such as skyrocketing rates of air pollution, and diseases that have resulted from them. The government continues to do nothing about the pollution and instead allows people to die from lung diseases to maintain their power.
          This reminds me of some parts of our media that discuss things like celebrities and sporting events instead of more important matters. It keeps people from questioning their government’s solutions to problems by distracting them with entertainment. In the book Ben Richards discovers the truth about the pollution problem when he meets Bradley Throckmorton, whose sister suffers from a lung disease caused by the pollution. Bradley has researched the pollution and managed to build a nose filter to protect people’s lungs from the pollution, but when he attempts to spread what he found through Ben Richards, it is suppressed by the games association.  Instead the games associations uses his attempt to spread Bradley’s findings to lower public opinion of him even further, which results in the lynching of Ben Richard’s family. At the end of the book, the games association claims to have nothing to do with his families deaths, but I personally think they did so something to intentionally cause their deaths, and even if they did not, they did cause it indirectly by releasing propaganda to the public to make Ben Richards look bad, which caused them to attack his family.