I have read some old things for English class (17th and 18th century), and have read some Brave New World and 1984, and now I want to see what other 20th and 21st century writers have come up with.
I’d like it to be in the form of fiction, whether novel or short story or, heck, even poem, and I’m not really interested in tracts and manifestos, though if you think something is worth recommending, go right ahead. If not me, someone else might find it useful.
It can be feminist, socialist, ecological, or whatever type of u- or dystopia, I want to hear the crazy ideas from all ideological walks of life.
Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day can be described as Brave New World brought forward to the computer age. It’s particularly popular among libertarians, though I’ve always seen it as a logical extension of obsessive corporate data gathering.
The Hunger Games is a young adult dystopian trilogy that’s the It Thing right now - the first one is excellent, the last two opinions vary on. I liked 'em.
Sheri S. Tepper seems to only write dystopian books about feminism and ecology, and it gets really old once you’ve read a few but some of them are excellent.
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach was pretty good for its time.
The Pacific Northwest successfully secedes from the union.
They then enforce a culture that makes the Greens look like neocons.
You beat me to the recommendation!
One correction: Corporations being but paper creations of the government, libertarians are very anti-corporate–so “though” should more accurately be “and.”
Before anyone else does, let me recommend We by Yevgeny Zamyatin written in 1921. It has all the dystopian characteristics - people with numbers, not names, spying, control of sex. Of course he had an unfair advantage, living in one of the first real dystopias, Soviet Russia. Most importantly, the translation I had is not only of historical interest but also kept my interest as a story.
Dystopian:
“The Pedestrian” and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“The Analgoues” by Damon Knight. I understand this was the first chapter of his novel, Hell’s Pavement, but I haven’t read the novel
*The Space Merchants *by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
*Between Planets *by Robert A. Heinlein. *Citizen of the Galaxy *also presents at least one nasty society.
Utopian
“The World-Timer” by Robert Bloch. One of my favorite SF stories, it’s in the collection The Best of Robert Bloch.
“And Then There Were None,” by Eric Frank Russell, a novella which was expanded into the novel The Great Escape
Karres of James Schmitz’s *The Witches of Karres *seems to have a pretty cool society.
Some of the future societies in Kim Stanleys Robinson’s new novel *Galileo’s Dream *seem to be pretty decent.
Another dystopian kids’ series (which I enjoyed as an adult) is The Shadow Children by Margaret Peterson Haddix, starting with** Among the Hidden**. The premise is that the world has suffered severe food shortages due to enduring drought, and families are only allowed two children per household. What happens when a third child is born becomes the narrative theme of the books.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Coast trilogy is his more interesting take on the subject. Each book is thematically related rather than with standard plot and characters, because each explores a different aspect of the utopian/dystopian balance.
I took a course on utopias in college. At the end we voted for our favorite. We overwhelmingly voted for Walden II, which disconcerted the professor, who preferred Plato’s Republic, which disconcerted us since we all saw that as a horror show. The only other thing I remember is that a) there is no such thing as a livable utopia because b) there is no such thing as a readable utopia. Dystopias live in literature; utopias die miserably.
Utopian – Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy. A politically progressive socialist utopian future America of 2000, as envisioned in the Gilded Age (published in 1888). Interesting, if a bit preachy (but given its plot structure and polemical purpose, it could not help but be), it’s enlivened by some truly prescient technological and scientific projections, like home radios picking up musical broadcasts.
I doubt it gets frequently cited in such threads, but Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (publ. 1957) covers both sides, as it charts a USA sliding into a collectivist hell-on-earth, with the last of its good principle characters escaping to their libertarian utopia (“Galt’s Gulch”) at the end.
Just want to chime in and second this recommendation. *We *is an awsome book. In fact, finding myself strangely between books tonight, I may pull this classic off the shelf and reread it. Wonderful (or wonderfully horrific) novel.
Robert Harris’s alt-history Fatherland posits that Germany conquered Western Europe during WWII, and that a Greater German Reich eventually stretches from the UK all the way deep into the Soviet Union (just hanging on as a rump state, engaged in perpetual guerilla warfare with Germany). By 1964, a harsh Nazi ideology extends throughout the Reich in a society which is totally militarized, politicized and surveilled. An excellent but very chilling book.
I can’t comment on the literary quality of this book because I haven’t read it yet, but Jules Verne wrote a novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century, that he unsuccessfully tried to get published in 1863 (and was first published in French in 1994 and in English in '96). According to the jacket summary and blurbs, though, it should probably be classified as dystopian, since his imagination emphasizes the dehumanizing aspects of technological progress, growing income inequality and population growth.
Some of the details he got right: cities lit up by electric lights; horseless carriages; an extensive subway system; 24/7 commerce; calculators; fax machines; computers; tall buildings with elevators; amplified musical instruments and very loud concerts; throngs of homeless people languishing on city streets, and state executions by electric chair.
