Book Description

4 of 5 stars: Some moments made my heart warm and others made me grit my teeth. The ending blew my mind! Not what I expected at all and I know that it was a powerful ending for a stand alone, BUT I'm hoping that the story doesn't end here! Rachael Sizemore's GoodReads review. Following promises of change, in a grand affirmative action, the Provider usurped control and created Our State. Across the frigid, snow covered lands; brilliant domed cities called Progressives were erected. For the inhabitants within, life is complete bliss. They are kept ignorant, bestowed rights by the Provider, all they could ever want, a simple exchange for their allegiance. They are the Served, they are the Progs. The Servers, however, are afforded no such luxuries. Their ability, their genetic make-up that predisposes them to productive endeavors and creative expression is their bane, but as the Provider has conditioned them to believe, it is also their freedom, the freedom to serve. Wooden bunks strewn with straw, barbed wire fence, and machine gun towers make up their tenement, their home. Their guards, the Black Cats, provide order and discipline, motivation. For one Server, Medical Provider Blair Huxley, questions continue to plague him. He suffers from the treasonous ailment termed individual thought. A chance encounter with a Prog at the Medical Rights Facility adds to Huxley’s questions, questions concerning the morality of the system of which he is a part. His journey towards answers brings him face to face with the true meaning of Chainge. “Knowledge creates choice; choice leads to chaos. Chaos begets pain, strife, conflict, and the insidious act of thought. We offer the people something far better: ignorance. The body is but an easel, ignorance the blank slate of the mind, an empty canvas upon which we freely paint, in brush strokes of various hues, the images of bliss. Rest assured, Server Huxley, we are not tyrants or villains, we are not despots or dictators; we are visionaries, we are emancipators, and we are artists. A person cannot want what they do not know exists. We keep the Served blissful by keeping them ignorant. It is as though the Served are a donkey following a carrot on a stick. We keep a simple pleasure before them. They will always go the direction we wish for them to go, for we are the carrot. “ Andrei Zamyatin Overseer of Bliss and Harmony Progressive 17 While paying homage to the likes of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Zamyatin’s We, and Rand’s Anthem, Chainge depicts the story of a Server who has the strength to question a system, a system devoid of logic and draped in twisted morality.