Top Ten Tuesday: Worlds I'd Never Want to Live In

Top Ten Tuesday topic is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic is Top Ten Worlds I'd Never Want to Live In.

This one was tough! It's much more normal to read about worlds that are fun to escape to, so I only managed to come up with five.

The Top Five Worlds I'd Never Want to Live In

1. The FAYZ, from Gone by Michael Grant. The FAYZ is brutal, a place where children exploit supernatural powers against one another, completely cut off from adult supervision and the outside world. The scene with Penny and the licorice veins still gives me nightmares. Whether by starvation, psychological torture, or at the mercy of a supernatural immortal deity inhabiting the body of a young girl, I'd probably be dead within a week of living in the FAYZ.

2. Cittàgazze, from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. Cittàgazze is the city in a parallel universe where Will first meets Lyra. The city is overrun with Spectres, which attack adults but leave children, to whom they are invisible, alone. The town is full of groups of children with no adults, which almost sounds like a child's paradise, but once the children reach adolescence they are attacked by the Spectres, who leave them soulless and zombie-like. The image of the boy on the brink of adolescence, swarmed by Spectres he couldn't quite see but were just waiting to attack, always conjured up a sense of horror in me.

3. Camazotz, from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. The eerie, homogenous alien planet ruled by the pulsating evil brain IT. Camazotz was an example of life on a planet ruled by the Black Thing, the source of all evil which the Murry children's father was fighting. The residents of Camazotz live in total conformity, down to the children of each identical house on a block bouncing balls and skipping rope in total unison, terrified of the consequences of breaking from the rhythm. Every resident is controlled, down to the minutest of actions, by IT. A world without individuality and freedom of expression is definitely not one I'd want to live in. And a disembodied brain with mind-control powers as a leader doesn't sound too appealing, either.

4. Charn, from The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis. Charn is the dying world Digory and Polly visit before traveling to Narnia. It had been governed by an empire of corrupt rulers before Queen Jadis (later to become the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) uttered the Deplorable Word, killing everyone in the world but herself, out of spite after her sister won the civil war the two had been fighting. It's pretty clear that Charn is meant to represent a post–nuclear war world. I was always fascinated to read about Charn when I was younger, but it would be terrible to live in a world doomed by the cruelty and spite of its leaders. (Earth still has a good ways to go before we sink that low!)

5. Incarceron, from Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. Incarceron is a living prison, a manmade world sealed off from the outside world. No one ever leaves, and most of the residents are the descendants of the original inmates. It had originally been conceived as a way to rehabilitate prisoners, but something went wrong, and the gateway between the world of Incarceron and the outside world was sealed. Its been a while since I've read this book, so I don't remember too many details about Incarceron clearly. It was vast, containing cells, roads, trees, trains, and only one person, half-legend, had ever managed to escape. Being locked up and left forgotten in a prison is an absolute nightmare (and I can't believe how regularly this happens even in the U.S.!), and that's basically the whole of Incarceron.