The Thousand Floor Essay

There are very few certainties in life, but one of the few things that can be guaranteed is change. The future is one of these times that is full of these changes. The future is thought of as a place with many changes to society’s functions, the development of the world, and the people inhabiting it. When the changes are characterized as bad, it can quickly make the future seem dystopian. The Thousand Floor, a novel by Katharine McGee, is set in the year 2118. The future is characterized by large technological leaps and a social system that is present to keep people separated. One of the story’s main characters, Avery Fuller, experienced these technological feats personally. This is shown by her being made from mined DNA from her parents. The

The Thousandth Floor can effectively use this futuristic setting filled with many restrictions to help implement the ideas of a dystopia. As an important part of the story, a “Setting is crucial and invokes otherness of time, place, and/or reality. Both the physical setting of the story and the inherent technical and scientific detail create this essential frame” (Saricks 245). This novel uses its futuristic setting to encapsulate the idea of a dystopia by giving the characters a place to be set up against not only each other but also the world itself. As the characters live in the tower, it is described that “Steel supports arced from each corner, joining overhead to form the Tower’s iconic spire…Beneath her bare feet lay the biggest structure on earth, a world unto itself… She wondered how it would feel, falling two and a half miles” (McGee 7). The characters in this story live in this two-and-a-half-mile-long tower, which is the largest structure known to humankind. The tower comes to a spiraling point at the peak, forming a pyramid shape in which the bottom floors have many more houses and people than the higher ones. This creates severe contrasts between the higher and lower classes. These class differences only go to highlight the inherent nature of how this future dystopian society would be run, with the rich at the pinnacle and the poor being pushed to the bottom. The tower also goes to serve as a restriction to the citizens as they are being constantly monitored throughout their lives. Furthermore, there are other instances of this futuristic setting being used for great strides in the story. One of the many uses of the setting is that “This is speculative fiction, frequently set in the future, it explores moral, social, intellectual, philosophical,