Books Five Books Five SFF Books About Oddballs Resisting Conformity Tales of dissidents, dissenters, and iconoclasts taking on the status quo… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on June 11, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The impulse to conformity is sadly human. It’s no surprise that many communities view those who deviate from local norms as fools to be educated or threats to be eliminated. From lofty C-suites to the dingiest villages, the world is filled with people who passionately believe that everyone should embrace the same beliefs, behaviors, diets, and fashions. What of the deviants who insist on wearing hats backward, who are left-handed, or who—most shocking of all—don’t rinse their dishes before putting them in the drying rack? What to do with them? Anyone familiar with Damon Knight’s toad theory of SF1… …that, as children, all (…) science-fiction writers were toads. (Science-fiction writers) didn’t get along with our peers. (Science-fiction writers) had no close friends and were thus thrown on our own internal resources. will not be surprised to discover that many SF authors have sided with the weirdos. Or, at the very least, have felt that oddballs made damn good protagonists. Consider these five works featuring oddballs. Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (1947) Having snatched Earth back from the brink of global atomigeddon, the Global Peace Commission then took control of the planet. In the name of the greater good, the Commission diligently ensures that the entire population conforms to strict standards. Considerable care is taken to ensure that potentially dangerous facilities, like Uranium Pile One, are overseen by intelligent, reliably sane people like Joseph Breden. Joseph is beginning to doubt his own sanity. Joseph is plagued by disturbingly violent dreams. What Joseph does not know is that he is being manipulated by people convinced that they know the true path to a utopian future…a very different world seen in psionic visions whose true nature the conspirators have comprehensively misunderstood. Modern readers might find it useful to know this tale has some eye-brow-raising ablism, even by the standards of 1947. What particularly caught my attention was the fact that the conspirators not only didn’t seem too bothered that the path to PROGRESS! and utopia led through a billion deaths2; alternatives that didn’t require megadeaths were not considered. Well, it was a different time… Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953) The development of photography, motion pictures, radio, and television transformed media into mass media. Mass appeal required simplification, methodical excision of controversial subjects, and most of all, an ignorant, uniform audience. Result: a nation of dullards content to stare slack-jawed at their wall-sized television screens. Guy Montag plays a vital role. He is a fireman, whose task it is to burn the few remaining books in America. Sure, the average American wouldn’t pick up a text if it were offered to them, but burning the books (and occasionally the book owners) drives home the lesson that deviation will be noticed and punished. It’s a fine life…until a conversation with charmingly eccentric teen Clarisse McClellan steers Guy towards the sins of reading and thinking. It’s an oft-overlooked fact that publishers often have well-developed senses of humour. Case in point: of all the novels Ballantine could have quietly bowdlerized in the name of avoiding controversy, the one they did bowdlerize was Fahrenheit 451, one of whose main points is that bowdlerizing in the name of avoiding controversy is bad. If your copy was printed between 1967 and 1980 (when Bradbury discovered what had happened), odds are it has been censored. The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd (1968) Rigidly stratified theocratic Earth, guided by the infallible robot pope, provides each person with a foreordained life. Occupation, future spouse, offspring, are mapped out for all. The system is perfect. The system is intended to endure unchanged until the end of time. Haldane IV should have been a mathematician like his father and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. A glimpse of Helix’s irresistibly well-shaped buttocks leads Haldane to temptation, sin, and—thanks to his subpar talent with subterfuge—arrest, trial, conviction, and dispatch to the hell-world, Hell. Haldane’s adventures are only beginning! Some particularly cynical commenters have speculated that from time to time I slip in some old, dreadful book purely because I refuse to suffer alone. What a terrible thing to think about a perfectly benevolent reviewer. Take this book, for example… Nobody can deny this may well be John Boyd’s best novel. Watchstar by Pamela Sargent (1980) Stupendous mental powers provide Daiya AnraBrun’s people with comfortable lives and even more comforting beliefs. The only costs are stifling conformity and an appalling infanticide rate, not to mention mandatory rites of passage from which most teens never return. It’s a small price to pay…for the survivors. A chance encounter with stranger Reiho sends Daiya on the path to apostacy. Telepathically mute off-worlder Reiho opens Daiya’s eyes to possibilities that she never before considered3. There is only one way to survive the rite of passage. Thanks to Reiho, Daiya discovers a second way. Daiya is a lucky survivor! Or as her people would put it, an abomination to be expunged. Readers may wonder how this society manages to survive stupendous infant and youth death rates. The answer is lots and lots and lots of babies, most of who are doomed. The novel does not make a strong case for the desirability of homicidally conformist psionic communities4. Dreamrider by Sandra Miesel (1982) The Federation subjects humanity to never-ending peace, prosperity, high-quality art from a diverse range of creators, and worst of all, affordable health care. Eccentrics, the perpetually perplexed, and other non-conformists are ruthlessly provided with therapy, medication, even sensibly-priced and orientation-appropriate sex therapists. This is the grim world that Ria LaGarde calls home5. The sticking point from Ria’s perspective is that mental health authority PSI is vigilant, confident, and diligent. Once PSI decides that someone needs therapy, that someone will almost certainly be subjected to it. Indeed, trying to refuse therapy may be taken as evidence for that person’s dire need for therapy. Already on PSI’s radar, Ria wants to avoid further attention… so being chosen for very special powers by a talking otter from another world is an unwanted complication. Many dystopias rely on armed and armored brute squads who kick down doors, bag dissidents, and drag them off to unnamed secret prisons. (Sound familiar?) The Federation prefers intrusive monitoring and passive-aggressive nagging, an endless drip-drip-drip of helpful, unasked for advice that the recipient would surely accept, if only they knew what was best for them. Imagine tyranny as carried out by well-meaning high school guidance counselors. Of course, there are many classics not mentioned above, not least A Wrinkle in Time (omitted because it’s so well known and because I must have mentioned it before). Feel free to extol the ones of which you are particularly enamored6. As quoted by Frederik Pohl in his The Way The Future Was. ︎This is an example of what I call the Vending Machine Model of progress: if you stuff enough corpses into the machine it somehow produces a better world. ︎Such as the fact that off-worlders exist at all. ︎I wonder if Yusuke Kishi’s 2008 Nihon SF Taisho Award-winning novel Shin Sekai Yori was influenced by Watchstar or if similar premises simply led to similar destinations? ︎This may sound to some readers very like 1989’s Shaman, whose author was also named Sandra Meisel. This is because it’s the same Sandra Meisel, and Shaman is an expanded version of Dreamrider. I own the 1982 version, so that’s the one I reviewed. ︎Although if you could refrain from complaining that one of the five works mentioned was not mentioned, that would be peachy. I find that actually reading the article before complaining about its shortcomings is useful in avoiding such comments as “why did you not mention [book that was the first example]?” ︎The post Five SFF Books About Oddballs Resisting Conformity appeared first on Reactor.