Dystopian literature - My top five picks

C

Cypress

Well-known member
The most memorable ones I have read, so far...

“We” - Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)
The dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia. Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul.

“The Stand” – Steven King (1978)
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic horror/fantasy novel by American author Stephen King. It outlines the total breakdown of society after the accidental release of a strain of influenza that had been modified for biological warfare causes an apocalyptic pandemic, which kills off over 99% of the world's human population.

1984 – George Orwell (1949)
Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.

"Metro 2033" - Dmitry Glukhovsky (2005)
It is set in the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust. The year is 2033, the world has been reduced to rubble, and humanity is nearly extinct, half-destroyed cities having become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms—mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. A few score thousand human survivors live on in the Moscow Metro—the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters—or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, and feelings have given way to instinct—the most important of which is survival, at any price.

"The Road" – Cormac McCarthy (2006)
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic novel detailing the journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth.
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source credits: Amazon, Goodreads, and Wikipedia book summaries.
 
Cypress said:
The most memorable ones I have read, so far...




source credits: Amazon, Goodreads, and Wikipedia book summaries.
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Dune - Frank Herbert
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dick
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
 
Alas, Babylon - is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age and has remained popular more than half century after it was first published, consistently ranking in Amazon.com's Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories list (which groups together short story collections and novels) and has an entry in David Pringle's book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. (Wikipedia entry)

Love "The Stand."
 
The trouble with dystopian literature is that it is so clearly optimistic compared with the looming reality.
 
Nomad said:
Brave New World?

Fahrenheit 451?

Brazil?

Blade Runner?
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Good call....Blade Runner = absolutely ground-breaking.

In the genre of dystopian film, you know what I forgot? "28 Days Later"...at this point, I have to rank that one ahead of Road Warrior in the dystopian film category. That was the best zombie apocalypse movie I have ever seen, by a country mile.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Alas, Babylon - is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age and has remained popular more than half century after it was first published, consistently ranking in Amazon.com's Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories list (which groups together short story collections and novels) and has an entry in David Pringle's book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. (Wikipedia entry)

Love "The Stand."
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A solid recommendation. I am much obliged!
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Alas, Babylon - is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age and has remained popular more than half century after it was first published, consistently ranking in Amazon.com's Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories list (which groups together short story collections and novels) and has an entry in David Pringle's book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. (Wikipedia entry)

Love "The Stand."
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AND... it was set in the East Central Florida town I grew up in.

Mentioned well known local landmarks and the main character lived on the same road several kids I knew from school lived on.

We read it in HS English class.
 
The best I have read in the last three years was American War by Omar El Akkad
 
iolo said:
The trouble with dystopian literature is that it is so clearly optimistic compared with the looming reality.
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We survived Maggie Thatcher and Bedtime for Bonzo, so keep a stiff upper lip, mate!

But, I get what you are saying.
You are actually channeling one of my favorite current authors:

"What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays, when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?"

Interview: Dmitry Glukhovsky on the ‘Dubious Reality’ of Putin’s Russia

In today’s Russia, ‘one single government-corporation rules and owns the country,’ says Dmitry Glukhovsky, whose new novel ‘Text’ has sold into 14 languages and/or territories to date.

For better or worse, Glukhovsky shows no fear in addressing the Kremlin and, as he puts it, “the ever-rotting, pretentious, cynical, and proudly immoral caste of Russian rulers.

“I believe that we live in truly wonderful times,” Glukhovsky tells us, “wonderful” for the writers willing to see what he defines as “an epoch of not only post-truth but also post-ethic.” It’s a time in which societies, he says, “are re-enacting the biggest traumas of the last century. Dictatorships. Cold War. Fascism.

“These are really the times when all a writer needs to do is sit down and focus carefully on the dubious reality unfolding around him. What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays,” he asks, “when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?

“The ruling class” of the Putin era, he says, “is losing touch with the reality. This process is going faster and faster, to the complete amazement of the public. The people deserve something bigger than just propaganda news stories on Russian. “Text speaks not only of the total corruption of Russian law-enforcement, but also of the arrival of a two-caste system within the Russian society. There’s a caste of people who are ‘the system’ or who serve it: officials, police and special services, the MPs—but also propaganda journalists, organized crime kingpins, and even church leadership. In Putin’s Russia, all of these institutions are just departments of one single government-corporation that rules and owns the country.

“Other, simpler people are like serfs in the old times. Let alone privileges, these ‘serfs’ don’t have any guarantees of such basic human rights as freedom, property, or even life.

“The most interesting part of that phenomenon is, however, that the higher caste now wants to free itself of all moral restrictions. Wants to be free of ethics. It exists in a system of coordinates, in which there’s no good and no evil, no justice or injustice, no right and no wrong. Only strength and weakness are the opposing sides of this system, and the only value is your corporate loyalty.”

https://publishingperspectives.com/2...urt-book-fair/
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Though I have to admit to having read somewhere around a dozen dystopian novels I must admit I do find them depressing reads. The vast majority of them are just allegories for how royally screwed up things are now in the present.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Though I have to admit to having read somewhere around a dozen dystopian novels I must admit I do find them depressing reads. The vast majority of them are just allegories for how royally screwed up things are now in the present.
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Based on the predictions of Teabaggers that Obamacare and the 2009 Economic Stimulus Act would crash the economy, in view of wingnut warnings that we all would be trotted in front of Death Panels and frog marched off to FEMA Death Camps, I basically assumed we would all be living in a Kenyan Muslim Marxist-Socialist dystopian hell-scape by now.
 
Did anyone mention Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five & "Harrison Bergeron"

Catch-22 by American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961.

Soylent Green, 1973 American dystopian thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer

Hey Kids, Let's not forget:
Planet of the Apes
and supreme of them all...

Bizarro world of Superman

The Bizarro World is a fictional planet appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Introduced in the early 1960s, htraE is a cube-shaped planet, home to Bizarro and companions, all of ... Wikipedia

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Then there is the Hutus and Tutzis.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Though I have to admit to having read somewhere around a dozen dystopian novels I must admit I do find them depressing reads. The vast majority of them are just allegories for how royally screwed up things are now in the present.
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One of our neighbors is a novelist who has written several books in the genre. She tends to kind of be that way as well. But she also gives great massages so we don't care. lol
 
Cypress said:
Based on the predictions of Teabaggers that Obamacare and the 2009 Economic Stimulus Act would crash the economy, in view of wingnut warnings that we all would be trotted in front of Death Panels and frog marched off to FEMA Death Camps, I basically assumed we would all be living in a Kenyan Muslim Marxist-Socialist dystopian hell-scape by now.
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Instead, we're trapped inside a Trumpian reality/game show.
 
Cypress said:
Based on the predictions of Teabaggers that Obamacare and the 2009 Economic Stimulus Act would crash the economy, in view of wingnut warnings that we all would be trotted in front of Death Panels and frog marched off to FEMA Death Camps, I basically assumed we would all be living in a Kenyan Muslim Marxist-Socialist dystopian hell-scape by now.
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You mean were not? :O
 
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