utopias

Examines the history of the quest for the ideal life.

On the northwestern frontier of India, Conway was a passenger on a plane taken over by a native pilot and never heard of again. What Conway found in ShangriLa makes the story.

In this novel that unites characters from "The Giver" and "Gathering Blue," Matty, a young member of a utopian community that values honesty, conceals an emerging healing power that he cannot explain or understand.

After Morgan Stockhour and her friends escape Internment, she discovers that life on the ground is not safer, and that, perhaps, going over the edge has led her to madness.

With their utopia threatened by the war on the ground and the greed of two kings, Morgan and the others from Internment must find a way to save the city.

In this novel that unites characters from "The Giver" and "Gathering Blue, " Matty, a young member of a utopian community that values honesty, conceals an emerging healing power that he cannot explain or understand.

In 2044, Wade Watts escapes real life by spending all his time in a virtual utopia known as OASIS. The creator of OASIS hid a series of puzzles based in 1980s pop culture that when unlocked, give the player power and untold wealth. When Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle, thousands race to beat him to the prize, including those willing to murder Wade to win.

In the near future, the conjoined Armstrong twins, under the guise of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation, plot to create their own version of utopia using nanobots, while a guerilla group known as BZRK develops a DNA-based biot that can stop bots, but at risk of the host's brain.

"The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech... And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life..."--Front flap.

In the year 2044, Wade Watts, like the rest of humanity, chooses to escape reality and spends his waking hours in the limitless, utopian virtual world of the OASIS, but when Wade stumbles upon the first of the fiendish puzzles set up by OASIS creator James Halliday he finds he must compete with thousands of others--including those willing to commit murder--in order to claim a prize of massive fortune.