“Matched,” by Ally Condie (Nov. 2010), is the first book in a planned trilogy (the second book, Crossed, arrives in November 2011). This is juvenile fiction set in a dystopian society. I read it on my Nook.

There’s a word I’ve not used before–dystopian. That term refers to a futuristic society which appears utopian, but is repressive and authoritarian. It’s a negative utopia. Dystopias often require conformity to a regimented social order. Other examples from literature and film would be 1984, Farenheit 451, Logan’s Run, Minority Report, The Handmaid’s Tale, Rollerball, Brave New World, Aeon Flux, Clockwork Orange, and the Hunger Games trilogy.

Movies like Bladerunner and Soylent Green are futuristic, but not utopian. And movies like Mad Max and the Postman are post-apocalyptic, but neither futuristic nor utopian–just set in the future.

“Matched” revolves around Cassia, a girl living in a world where the Society (the government) controls and predicts everything. (The cover, with a girl enclosed in a green bubble, excellently portrays that.) The book starts with Cassia being matched–learning who the government has decided she will marry. This is a big event, a special day, something young people eagerly await. They willing accept their Match, because the Society knows best.

As it turns out, Cassia is matched with her best friend, Xander (it’s rare that you’re matched with somebody you know). But when she plugs in a data card containing information about her match, she briefly sees the face of another boy she knows, Ky. An Official comes to talk to her, telling her this was a mistake. But it gets her wondering, and she begins questioning the rules of her world.

Allie Condie

As the author said in an interview on Amazon, the book is about Cassia “learning to choose.” She loves Xander, who is a genuinely Good Guy, but is intrigued by Ky, who has a mysterious past and knows things other people don’t. Also, he’s an Aberration–a classification far beneath Cassia’s social status, something for people who don’t fit in. As an Aberration, Ky can never be matched, and his role in life will never get better than working in the garbage processing plant.

It’s kind of a love story, or an infatuation story, as Cassia’s friendship with Ky deepens. And there’s obviously a love triangle. But it’s all G-rated, innocent. I think there was a kiss, but nothing beyond that.

Condie builds a society that seems perfect. The government controls everything, but in a way people accept. It’s not a heavy-handed police state, at least not where Cassia lives. In the outer regions, where Ky is from–that’s a different story, though this book doesn’t tell us much about it. There are many Officials–both of Cassia’s parents are Officials–who have extra authority in the Society. But nobody’s carrying a weapon, nobody gets imprisoned. It’s a benevolent dystopia.

The Society determines who you marry, what job you’ll have, what you eat (meals are delivered, with portions and enrichments tailored for each person), and even when you die. Everyone dies on their 80th birthday.

If anyone bucks the system, shows individuality, they can be Reclassified. That’s what happened to Ky, as a result of transgressions by his parents. But it’s even worse to be an Anomaly. Condie never really explains the ramifications of this classification; we just know it’s the lowest rung on the ladder.

The book alludes to an earlier world, which is clearly our world. People are allowed to own one “relic” from the past. In Cassia’s case, it’s a compact. Most everything else from the World That Was has been destroyed.

Cassia, who tells the story first-person, says:

You never know when technology might fail. That’s what happened to the society before ours. Everyone had technology, too much of it, and the consequences were disastrous. Now, we have the basic technology we need–ports, readers, scribes–and our information intake is much more specific. Nutrition specialists don’t need to know how to program air trains, for example, and programmers, in turn, don’t need to know how to prepare food. Such specialization keeps people from becoming overwhelmed. We don’t need to understand everything.

When it comes to culture, the Society kept 100 of everything and ditched the rest. There are the Hundred Poems, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Songs, Hundred Stories. Everyone knows and studies these, but nothing more. The Society had decided their culture was too cluttered, “and everyone believed because it made sense. How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much?”

Cassia’s grandmother was one of the cultural historians who helped select the Hundred Poems. But she receives from her grandfather a Dylan Thomas poem he has secreted away, “Do Not Go Gentle.” This poem plays an important role in the book, a continuing theme which motivates much of Cassia’s thinking and actions.

Condie draws an interesting world, with plenty of details, and yet there’s so much I don’t know about it. The Hunger Games struck me the same way. I’ve read only the first book in each of these series, and will definitely read the others. I’m sure more of this futuristic world–how it developed, who is in control, etc.–will unfold in subsequent books. I guess Condie provided enough, for now.

“Generation Kill” is among the many superb books written by journalists about the Iraq and Afghan wars. Dexter Filkins, David Finkel, Sebastian Junger, John Krakauer, Michael Yon…and now Evan Wright. Though actually, Wright came first, publishing this book in 2004.

Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone contributing editor, was embedded with the First Recon Marines during the 2003 invasion. As soon as the invasion started, they were at the forefront, plunging deep into Iraqi territory. The book won a national magazine award, and was adapted as an HBO miniseries.

Wright specialized in writing about youth subcultures–radical environmentalists, skateboarders, criminals. He saw the military as another youth subculture. He pitched the idea to his Rolling Stone editor, and found himself in a combat zone for the first time. And whereas many reporters experience one firefight and then go home to tell their story and act like experts, Wright endured 17 firefights, including one during which 26 bullets slammed into his Humvee door.

Evan Wright

“Generation Kill” definitely has the feel of Rolling Stone. The tone and style would make the legendary Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson proud (though Thompson would have been a bit more irreverent).

Whereas Sebastian Junger’s book “War” was focused in one place, “Generation Kill’ is pretty much a frantic, careening joyride through southern Iraq. It reminded me a bit of Kelly’s Heroes.

Take a bunch of young men, train them to use very destructive weapons, get them hyped up, and then send them out to meet the enemy. That’s a recipe for mayhem. And Wright records plenty of mayhem. These young soldiers, highly trained and eager to use their expensive weapons, shoot up the countryside, including a number of innocent bystanders. There are a couple incidents which could easily be labeled as war crimes, and the targeting of civilians is disturbing, though the “fog of war” justifies a good deal of it.

“However admirable the military’s attempts are to create Rules of Engagement, they basically create an illusion of moral order where there is none. The Marines operate in chaos. It doesn’t matter if a Marine is following orders and ROE, or disregarding them. The fact is, as soon as a Marine pulls the trigger on his rifle, he’s on his own. He’s entered a game of moral chance. When it’s over, he’s as likely to go down as a hero or as a baby killer.”

Wright does a good job of presenting surreal images of war.

“Corpses of the Iraqi attackers who fell in the road have been run over repeatedly by tracked vehicles….There’s a man in the road with no head, and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She’s wearing a dress and has no legs….

“You pass three dead men by the road, surrounded by weapons, then shepherds in the field behind them waving and smiling. There’s a car with a dead woman shot in the backseat–no hint why Marines or helicopters shot her.”

Wright makes regular pop-culture references. Of one harrowing drive through a hostile Iraqi town, with everyone emerging unscathed, he wrote, “The whole engagement was like one of those cheesy action movies in which the bad guys fire thousands of rounds that all narrowly miss the hero.”

He  throws out a lot of interesting tidbits, like the fact that while the Marines generally use the metric system, snipers still do everything in yards. And then there are wonderful lines and passages like these:

• “There’s a definite sense of exhilaration every time there’s an explosion and you’re still there afterward.”
• “US military doctrine is pretty straightforward in situations like this: if there even appears to be an imminent threat, bomb the crap out of it.”
• “One thing you can say about intense weapons fire, it sounds like it ought to. It’s an extremely angry noise.”
• “In a pitched firefight, denial serves one very well. I simply refuse to believe anyone’s going to shoot me.”
• “In addition to the embarrassing loss of bodily control that 25 percent of all soldiers experience, other symptoms include time dilation, a sense of time slowing down or speeding up; vividness, a starkly heightened awareness of detail; random thoughts, the mind fixating on unimportant sequences; memory loss; and, of course, your basic feelings of sheer terror.”

Wright updated the book in 2008 by tracking down many of the soldiers and letting us know what they’re doing now. Some re-upped for additional tours. He tells their stories, and captures their reflections on the early days of the invasion, in the “Afterword.” This may have been my favorite part. Having become so acquainted with these soldiers, I was delighted to learn what became of them. The book had been out for several years, and the Marines apparently felt Wright captured what happened pretty well. At least, they were open to talking to him again.

Like Eric Kocher, a prominent character in the book. He served four deployments in Iraq, but called it quits in 2007. “I’m just tired of seeing fifty-dollar bombs destroy two million dollar vehicles and kill Marines every day.”

Wright uses the real names of soldiers, except for several officers who are clearly incompetent and, in one case, a little nuts. For them, he goes by their nicknames, two of them being Captain America and Encino Man. I kind of appreciated that.

This is a superb book. I’m not sure that I would recommend it above some of the others I’ve read, but it definitely ranks among the best books about our present wars written thus far.