House of the Scorpian by Nancy Farmer:
My big question during this semester was “What does the American experience mean to me?” This book helped to answer this question in a similar way to Brave New World. The plot of this book consists of a boy harvested as a clone to one of the most powerful drug lords in the country of Opium. Throughout the first part of this book clones like himself are segregated against for their origin and mental composure. The American experience however can easily relate to how certain individuals and how they can discriminate against others for not only what they wear, or how they present themselves; but entire races and origins of people. This is like Brave New World in the sense that a visualized class system as believed by Aldous Huxley would be one of the only ways to make this system work.
This book helped me to better understand my big question in how these very simple metaphors found in books, or these two specific ones, that the American Experience is decided by the origin of the Experience. In both of these books different classes of people are decided through class how to be placed on a social ladder. The American Experience you could say is based on what others make, which you could easily connect to advertisement, reality television, and other forms of advertising that have worked there way into peoples’ lives telling them how to act, what to look like, etc. to gain a social conformity.
I would recommend this book for the reasons of how this metaphor can relate on a large scale of how America functions and how individuals filtering themselves into the American society are affected. This book encompassed a clear plot, and an ingenious setting that makes the book a must read.
