Ignorance Is Strength

By: John Joseph Adams - editor, Hugh Howey - editor and contributor, Christie Yant - editor

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Susan Hanfield, Janina Edwards, Justin Eyre, Kathe Mazur, Stefan Rudnicki, Mirron Willis, Judy Young, full cast

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

George Orwell once wrote of a world where abuse of power begins with an abuse of language and a bastardization of truth. Some of today's most exciting voices in speculative fiction explore the ramifications of those ideas in Ignorance Is Strength.

The Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength - before the dystopia - focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes - during the dystopia - turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light - after the dystopia - concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

Ignorance Is Strength features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

©2020 by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing and Skyboat Media, Inc.

Eye opening and provocative

A beautifully diverse collection filled with cautionary tales of societal collapse. Definitely going to check out the other ones!

altogether not bad

The stories vary widely in quality. I got hooked at first two and also some others are pretty good, some quite boring. The very worst one is the last piece - not so much a distopic story as a self-pitying woke propaganda not even cleverly hidden, just dull.

Dark, Thought Provoking Dystopian Sci-Fi

Dystopian works are nearly always political commentary, or commentary on the state of mankind or our view of reality. These stories, when listened to with their counterparts in the other two collections in this series, are incredible.
These stories ask you to reflect on yourself, our society, and our future. Wonderful.

Too real

Its depressing how fanatics cant see what there doing even after it's too late.

Lol

The low rates is from people who wish "True Americas" (a concept in some of the novels, where talkshow hosts claim schoolshootings is not real) might only like Tucker Carlsons material.

When dystopian stories is claimed to be politically propaganda, you(in US) really have trouble. Seems like some would category Fahrenheit 451/Big brother utopia..

(Trump + JFK jr for 2024 shirt guy claim Jim Carrey is playing Biden because Biden is dead. This was news today..)

Lots of Left Leaning Politics

Don’t we get enough of this? Some of the stories were great but others were just boring ordinary rhetoric you can find blue hairs screaming about on Twitter. So, if you’re into that you’ll enjoy this. Some stories were creative so I wouldn’t discount this completely. I love of good dystopian story as much as anyone and I don’t worship at the alter of progressive dogma, yet I enjoyed a few stories. Not total trash.

wow!

loved this. yes it's an anthology so not every story hit it out of the ballpark for me however most of them did. I don't review often but this was good enough to get one.

We’re farked!

Good times were generally not had by most characters... Stories scarily prescient. Looking forward to next in series...

Amazing! I was really impressed.

When I stared these I was open minded and I grew to love them. I had no preconceived ideas about any of the author writing styles and was happily suppressed and impressed. After listening and reading other reviews some people said they were too political for sci-fi and I found that yes they were political but there was no “too”. This series embraced fears that me and mine have for many parts of the future for our country and society. It all hit close to home and I found the series beautiful. They comforted a compulsive worrying anxious Anarchist soul in a way I haven’t felt about fiction in longer than I can remember. This triptych will be added to my libraries in every possible format I can get my hands on. They are now a personal favorite.

Decent stories, seemingly unaware of its own ironies

Some of the stories were very good/well written by I found it interesting that most look to be decrying all societal issues on the usual “racist, hetero white male patriarchy” evil-ness in worlds where most of the population seems to be made up of married lesbian couples or trans teens. I also found it ironic in the context of the series that those views most represented in the stories generally advocate for the types of authoritarian government policies that Orwell was warning against…he would have thought this double plus ungood.