Hi folks,
I'm looking to do a deep dive into dystopian fiction, specifically the formative/canon works of the genre.
So far I've identified the following books:
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
1984 – George Orwell
Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
Looking to see what other books I should be adding to this least. I'm not looking for any recs from the 2000/2010s YA dystopia boom.
Thanks!
by Glansberg90
18 Comments
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam)
John Wyndham – The Chrysalids
Nevil Shute – On the Beach
‘The Man In The High Castle’ by Philip K. Dick
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Alas, Babylon
The Giver, by Lois Lowry, predates the boom in YA dystopias and was formative for generations of young readers. A great exploration of the ways dystopia and utopia interconnect.
Dahlgren
Canticle for Leibowitz
Clockwork Orange
The Drowned World
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Ice, by Kavan
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. There are two versions – the UK got the happy ending and the US got the bleak ending.
Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” would be a good fit there.
Start with 1984. One of my favorites and super relevant for today.
The Parable of the Sower/Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
You missed Gulliver’s Travels
Idk about “canon,” but a lot of people hold V is for Vendetta in very high regard
This is a solid list –
Hrm… H G Wells the Time Machine (1895) might be added, probably should be
Candide (1759) is not a dystopia per se, but it is a satire of utopian thinking
LuridWaters recommends a Philip Dick title – several of his would work
A Boy and his Dog (1969) is a moderately influential work by Harlan Ellison
Hrm… I’m sure I read The Last Man by Mary Shelly but the fact that I cannot bring to mind does not speak well – but she did pretty much invent sci-fi
Kafka?
Ayn Rand was mentioned – I think Anthem would work for her
Gulliver’s Travels by Swift?
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky?
The Machine Stops (1909) by E M Forster should probably be there
+1 Clockwork Orange
Lord of the Flies.
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson.
Start with the original *Utopia* by Sir Thomas More from the 1500s. He write it in Latin. Some translations are better than others but I read the one I stumbled across in a little free library. I thought it was funny.
Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein. Probably Andre Norton if you read the right ones
It can’t happen here by Sinclair Lewis. It is an earlier work and less well known amongst casual readers than 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, but it’s a foundational work in the genre.
Not sure about era, I may be off base :
Station Eleven
I Who Have Never Known Man
The Road
Never Let Me Go
Tender is the Flesh