Personal taste aside, The Giver fails the sf Plausibility Test for me. I don't see how a society like the one depicted could be attained/sustained in anything other than a metaphorical world. And even considered as fantasy, rather than sf, the book is too damned obvious. Things are the way they are because The Author is Making A Point; things work out the way they do because The Author's Point Requires It.That's sure what I hate about soft SF dystopias, even the ones by people like LeGuin (who might not have girl cooties, as Doyle asserts, but she definitely has "halfwitted pseudo-Marxist hippie Orientalist" cooties, and those are worse). They always beat you over the head with their point; the specific message may have changed but fundamentally they're no different from Pilgrim's Progress. I know, your English teacher called them "important" and "relevant", but the word she meant—as all her be-bonneted Puritan forebears meant—was "moral".
Worse is that the moral is always incredibly vapid and simplistic; it makes the most platitudinous Victorian copy-book look like Twilight of the Idols. And it's not even vapid and simplistic in a contrarian way. Do you think delivering the message of the Giver—just be yourself, mindless conformity is bad—took any moral fortitude whatsoever in 1993 America? Please. Ironic or not, the American populace is in absolute lockstep uniformity in their praise the concept of individualism, free thought, and nonconformity. You will join the herd of independent minds, or you will be trampled under its completely interchangeable hooves.
There's not a single point where Handmaid's Tale deviates from the version of "fundamentalists" all of pop culture had been pushing since, oh, the Scopes Monkey Publicity Stunt. In no way does the Uglies series deviate from the after-school-special orthodoxies you might hear from your school counselor, vis-a-vis body-image issues and "cliques" (that that series actually has some of the better worldbuilding of soft SF dystopias is a sad comment on the genre). The research for Feed apparently consisted of listening to how teenagers talk on their cellphones at the mall, and then changing the slang around to make it sound ten times stupider and less natural—certainly nothing like finding out how long it takes to reach the moon, or how in vitro meat would really be cultivated (hint, it's not grown in open-air troughs, even if it is called a farm). Even Nineteen Eighty-Four is a series of improbable and inappropriate generalizations from (poorly understood, oversimplified, and often completely inaccurate) history; then again Orwell was a syphilitic British Socialist, so his demonstrating literacy at all is like the proverbial dog on its hind legs.
There is one exception, albeit only partial: Brave New World. Apart from a touch of Noble Savage, that really is fairly decent worldbuilding, and a semi-believable plot, with complexity of theme that manages to get that book misinterpreted by most English teachers. To be fair to them, though, many people nowadays are vociferously in favor of most of the things that book presents as components of dystopia, so it may just be cultural dissonance. Come to think of it Fahrenheit 451 is also usually misinterpreted, too—it suffers, like BNW does, from the fact its theme is a hell of a lot more complex than "censorship bad".
The History Channel exists because even Nazi Germany is a lot more complex than these dystopias—not even they could milk so many shows out of one of those societies. I'm not necessarily saying that nobody should do dystopian fiction, only that they shouldn't do it unless they can do justice to their subjects. People, even Stalinist or Nazi people, are not the strawmen-in-jackboots soft SF so frequently deploys, and painting them that way isn't all that far from the kind of propaganda techniques dystopia-writers supposedly deplore. How about you twerps read a little less Orwell and a little more Solzhenitsyn? He knew a little something about totalitarianism.
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