Great Works of Dystopian Fiction

We may or may not be living in a dystopian age, but we are certainly living in an age of dystopias. At every turn in a bookstore aisle, you’re increasingly likely to stumble across a vision of our world, through the looking glass. You’ll find the classics — your Orwells, Huxleys, and Atwoods — but you’ll also find a rising crop of new entries into the dystopian canon, from younger authors with fresher concerns about what, precisely, could spell our doom. They don’t just appear in the sci-fi section, either — dystopian fiction is firmly ensconced in book-club-ready literary circles, as well. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic. It’s in this spirit that we assembled a group of readers to put together a list of some of the greatest works of dystopian literature, as part of Vulture’s Dark Futures week. We received guidance from Jenny C. Mann and Ursula K. Heise, professors of English at Cornell and UCLA, respectively, both of whom study dystopian literature, and limited our selections to books with some connection to Earth. Beyond that, the sky was the limit. There are some familiar faces, but we also wanted to pluck from unexpected corners: You’ll find literary fiction, young-adult works, graphic novels, realist tomes, some books written long ago, and others published in just the last few years. We skew toward the recent, as the term wasn’t even invented until the 19th century and has only in the last half-century or so come into vogue.

That said, we’ve done our best to also put the spotlight on works from throughout literary history and pay homage to the early influencers. Heise cites Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man (1805) as the first end-of-the-world scenario. Mann points to the utopian works that have informed many of the books on our list — together, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (ca.1612), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) introduced the dominant forms and themes of the genre, which Mann sums up as: “The creation of alternate societies through the negation of despised aspects of the real world, the use of social engineering to make people ‘good,’ the difficulty of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbarous, the use of frame stories that pretend as if the document you are reading ‘really happened,’ the confusion of reality/fiction and truth/lies, the purpose of technology in a perfect society, and the question of who counts as ‘human.’” These books are all part of the same wary family and, taken as a whole, they provide a look not just at the power of a literary mode, but what we fear we are capable of. In our collective abridged accounts of Gulliver, we tend to remember the tiny people, and then the big people, and maybe the smart horses. But it’s a messier and stranger novel than you may recall from high school. After finally discovering what he thinks is a peaceful, reasonable civilization, Gulliver returns to England. He’s spent too much time in a utopia, and now he can’t tolerate the company of people. Far from a pat conclusion about humanity, Gulliver’s story ends in confident, uncomfortable ambiguity — is England the real nightmare, or is Gulliver a fool? Unlike so many of the dystopias that follow in Gulliver’s wake, there’s no hopeful gesture toward a better future. There’s just anger, misanthropy, and conversations with horses. The Last Man is a very early example of one of the most familiar, well-worn arcs in later dystopian imaginings: A plague arrives and wipes out all of mankind except for one lonely survivor. Today, we expect that as the opening storytelling salvo. (“Everyone died … now what?”) For Shelley, the events prophesied by the book’s title take the entire novel to come about, and it’s only at the end that we’re left with Lionel Verney, coping with his fate as the last person alive. Until that ending, it’s an expansive, mixed, far-reaching novel, full of love and war and shades of biography, both globally apocalyptic and highly personal. Like many dystopian writers, Butler takes a contemporary idea about how the world works and extends it to a logical extreme. For Butler, writing in the late-19th century, that theory is Darwinian. His protagonist stumbles upon a previously undiscovered land that implements natural selection as social policing: Illness and physical maladies are considered criminal and result in severe punishment and isolation, while crimes of amorality are treated as pitiable, temporary ailments. That alone makes Butler’s novel an important indictment of human cruelty, but Erewhon is most fascinating for Butler’s pioneering idea that machines might one day wake up. “There is no security,” Butler wrote, “against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness …” Move over Asmiov, Butler got there first. It’s strange that Wells’s The Time Machine hasn’t featured more prominently in the discourse about our times. The book’s anonymous Time Traveler makes his way from Wells’s 1890s to 802,701 A.D., where he encounters a civilization starkly divided between the childlike, hedonistic Eloi and the apelike, cavern-dwelling Moorlocks. The Moorlocks provide for the Eloi’s existence, then eat them for sustenance. One would figure the parallels to today would present themselves — the effete elites living off a bitter working class no one wants to look at … alas, our elite still seems able to fight off being dinner, for now. Before Mark Zuckerberg, before Steve Jobs, before Alan Turing, Edwardian novelist E.M. Forster foresaw our obsession with technology. In this shockingly prescient short story, all communication is done through screens, humans are isolated in cells below ground, and ideas are only shared by an omnipresent Machine that is worshiped as a god. Long before Kubrick’s monolith, Forster perceived how an overreliance on computers could lead to an isolated society, a homogeneous world, and a disregard of the truth. “In time,” the story warns, “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts.” Sound familiar? Your high-school English teacher probably taught you that 1984 and Brave New World were the pioneers of the sci-fi dystopia. But both Orwell and Huxley were influenced by an earlier, lesser-known Russian novel, written in 1921, smuggled into the U.S., and published in 1924. We tells the story of a future in the “One State” in which industrial efficiency is taken to its logical extreme: Humans aren’t considered people, but ciphers with names like D-503 and I-330, and the world they live in — down to the literal glass apartments they inhabit — has been mathematically engineered to eliminate unpredictability (don’t worry, if you fall ill and develop an imagination, an operation can be done to remove it). We is worth reading for its genre-pioneering pedigree, but the real star here is Zamyatin’s hallucinogenic prose — a style he likely developed as a by-product of his alleged synesthesia — which is so vivid and surprising, it keeps the reader pleasantly off-balance. The One State would surely hate it. In 1932, Huxley published a book about a society in which the opportunities to distract yourself with small pleasures are endless. If you didn’t read it in high school, it’s worth reading now, if only to revel in his foresight. Due to the mass use of soma — a harmless narcotic — and the value system its residents are allegiant to, everyone born into Huxley’s London happily accepts the caste they’re assigned to. The divvying up of roles — there’s Alpha and Beta, and the lower castes, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon — happens in vitro and is rarely protested against due to from-birth conditioning. The genesis of Brave New World was Huxley’s visit to America, where he saw that people could be mollified by advertising slogans, brand loyalty, and other capitalistic tenets. As the old saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” — and Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here is proof. This 1935 satire chronicles the career of fictitious U.S. politician Buzz Windrip, a populist senator who wins the presidency. As it turns out, he’s a bit of a fascist, but more frightening than his actions is the speed — and eagerness — with which Americans join him in his authoritarian crusade. Lewis understood the American soul better than most, and he makes a compelling case that fascist tendencies would make a horrifyingly good fit for our polity if presented with the right amount of good, old-fashioned patriotism. There’s something charmingly quaint about 1984 today. Oh, those were the days, weren’t they, when it seemed plausible that the world might fall to an overweening set of managerial states where everything moves smoothly so long as you surrender your freedom and get with the program. Nowadays, Orwell’s masterpiece is a fascinating artifact of a different era and its different worries. That said, even ol’ George couldn’t have predicted how trendy doublethink would become in 2017. Plus — and the novel never really gets enough credit for this — it’s just a cracking good yarn, full of terrifying twists and turns and marvelously deft world-building. Like the world of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time (which was almost certainly inspired by it), Vance’s Dying Earth had already been through numerous apocalypses. But it appears to be up for good, as we encounter it way at the end of the Sun’s lifespan. Humanity’s numbers wane, and the planet is steadily overrun by a crazy-quilt of strange creatures, some alien, some bio-engineered by long-dead societies. Wizards roam the land as well — that is, people who have mastered a small selection of reality-warping formulae that now-extinct super-advanced civilizations had developed. (If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons and wondered why your wizard character only knows a few spells at a time, you can thank Vance.) “Men are as plastic as wax,” was one of Vance’s mottos, and the endless ways people in his worlds adapt themselves to their environments and power structures were his main source of inspiration. Limbo begins as stories of scientific visionaries and/or mad scientists often do: with their central character in a self-imposed exile far from the conflicts of the world. Soon enough, the scientist in question, Dr. Martine, ventures to the Inland Strip — a.k.a. what remains of the United States after a third World War — and discovers that a pacifist movement has arisen whose adherents remove their arms and legs in favor of high-tech replacements. There’s a postmodern glee at work here: One crucial plot point is advanced via a found and annotated document, for instance. Wolfe’s novel posits a dystopia like no other, visceral and cartoonish in equal measure. There’s a hunger that propels Ray Bradbury’s seminal 1953 novel. Like a play told in three acts, the story is fueled first by protagonist Montag’s desire to burn outlawed books, then by his appetite to read their banned pages, and finally, by his determination to keep the legacy of the printed word alive. The story’s most powerful lesson is the one that Montag himself grasps in the end: Learn from the dead; study what came before; history has a habit of repeating itself. It was a pleasure to read. You know a book has had lasting impact when its plot can be used to describe a type of situation. In this case, Golding’s seminal 1954 tale about a plane full of barely teenage boys forced to try to govern themselves after crashing somewhere in the Pacific is what we think of whenever a group of people try to self-govern, and things fall apart in spectacular, terrifying fashion. The book works with the idea that, no matter how much we may want peace, some among us crave power. And that craving, “the darkness of man’s heart,” can turn into war and disaster. Yet in a strange twist of events, from Survivor to Lost, that very basic message has somehow been turned into entertainment for the masses in the 21st century. Written 12 years before 1984 and published under a male pseudonym, Burdekin’s feminist novel features many of the hallmarks of that other classic dystopia, with one striking difference: It recognizes the position of women. Critics of Orwell have long lamented his lack of development of his female characters, but here is a novel that not only includes the female role in a dark future, but scrutinizes the “Holy Mystery of Maleness” and acknowledges how violent a world run by men can be. By creating a world in which women are enslaved and treated no better than animals, Burdekin drew a blueprint for dystopian literature, while never forgetting that misogyny would be an integral architect.