I was coming to recommend this one. It’s one of these books I got more and more out of the text as I got older.
In R A Lafferty’s Past Master, the story begins on Golden Astrobe, a rich world settled by Earth humans in which the perfect society has been created. But things have gone horribly wrong. The powerful men who secretly rule the planet decide a figurehead president might heal the sick society. So they send an agent back in space & time to recruit Sir Thomas More. Who, of course, wrote Utopia.
Sir Thomas is “cut” from his lifeline not long before his execution & travels to Astrobe. His effect on the society & the society’s effects on him makes for quite an interesting tale. (It was nominated for the 1968 Nebula & the 1969 Hugo but won neither award.)
If you have never encountered R A Lafferty before, I envy you!
I’ll third this one; it’s really nice that it recognizes its utopia is pretty problematic.
Le Guin has a strong anthropological streak to her writing (dad was a famous anthropologist), and it comes through in a lot of her work, but none more strongly than Always Coming Home, a set of anthropological notes describing an historical society that existed in Northern California some 200,000 years in the future. Weirdly-written novel in format, but pretty fun to read.
Some feminist utopias:
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You describes a rapist waking up in a feminist society of dreamers. Pretty new-agey.
Egalia’s Daughters is more of a utopia, a satirical novel about a guy who lives in a woman-dominated society, gradually has a gender awakening, and writes a satirical novel about what it’d be like to be a woman living in a male-dominated society. I remember it being pretty clever.
The Fifth Sacred Thing is a decidedly neopagan utopia that heavily pushes the value of pacifism in the face of violence.
Woman on the Edge of Time has a woman trapped in a mental institution shifting back and forth between her hellish life and a possibly hallucinated gender utopia.
Frankly I think dystopias are a lot more fun to read. William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy are widely described as dystopian, although Gibson insists they’re more-or-less reality for most of the world, and that it’s privileged Americans who are living in a utopia. Phillip K. Dick wrote a buttload of dystopias. And you can’t get a world much bleaker than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Marge Piercy, author of Woman on the Edge of Time, has another dystopian novel that I have always enjoyed: He, She, and It. He, She and It - Wikipedia
World War Z by Max Brooks
Never Let Me Go by Ichiguro - the movie of this is being released soon.
That’s why I really like it. You’re right, I wouldn’t want to live there either, but to this day I’m not sure if it’s because Skinner is wrong or because I’ve been brought up to believe his vision is wrong.
Thirding “This Perfect Day” and seconding “Farenheit 451”. If you liked 1984 I’d also highly recommend “Animal Farm” if you haven’t read it yet.
Dystopian:
White Noise
A Canticle For Leibowitz
Brave New World
If you’re interested in a movie similar to 1984, check out Brazil, a Terry Gilliam movie with very similar themes. One of my favorite movies of all time. The directors cut is a must have, the theatrical version is a completely different movie (and nowhere near as good).
Utopian:
The Truth Machine
Stranger in a Strange Land (really surprised no one’s mentioned this yet. It’s a classic.)
Oh some more dystopian stuff (short stories, I don’t remember if there are utopian stories in it):
“The needle on full - lesbian feminist science fiction” Caroline Forbes
stories centered about women, sometimes only talking about women, and often lesbians.
Read it a handful of years ago, loved it. I photocopied the story that gave its name to the book. It talks about a society with oil shortage.
the one amazon review says: "This is a collection of nine short stories “from a lesbian feminist perspective.” Written in the late seventies and early eighties, some of the stories carry an imprint of the fears and politics of that time, making them seem a little out of date. Others are surprisingly apropos. The writing is strong and of good quality. "
Another vote for “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, a story about a crazy fundamentalist Christian society that (very minor spoiler)
uses a certain class of women as breeding machines for party officials and disposes of them when they’ve become infertile.
Very powerful and extremely disturbing!
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (author of The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money) is one of the great SF novels but seems to be little known. As a non-SF fan I enjoyed it as literature.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, has one of the most imaginative dystopian societies I’ve ever seen.
This is an excellent book–there is a new one too called The Year of the Flood that takes a look at all the characters in the year leading up to the events of Oryx and Crake. I actually liked that one even better.
Another one I loved was called *Shades of Grey *by Jasper Fforde. It is about a world from which the ability to see true color has been drained, and the status of people rests on the color they are able to see. Hard to explain, but incredibly interesting, unusual, and well-written.
One author I’ve rather enjoyed who seems to specialize in dystopian worlds is Richard Morgan. While I haven’t found his recent foray into fantasy as gripping, his science fiction novels have all been good reads, and while sharing a dark and dystopian outlook cover a range of other SF sub-genres:
[ul]
[li]Altered Carbon - quasi-cyberpunk gumshoe noir dystopia.[/li][li]Broken Angels - military science fiction dystopia.[/li][li]Woken Furies - Action / thriller dystopia.[/li][li]Market Forces - near future corporate dystopia, and IMHO the bleakest of the lot. (And my favourite of the five).[/li][li]Black Man (US title: Thirteen) - near future genetic engineering dystopia.[/li][/ul]
One of my favorites, if you can get hold of it is “With Folded Hands” (a novelette about a nanny-state distopia; still great despite being obviously written in the late 40s).
You might also like War Day by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, a travelogue about the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets; The Last Ship by William Brinkley, about the sole surviving U.S. Navy warship after a fullscale WWIII and the new society its crew struggles to create; and, of course, the classic On the Beach by Nevil Shute, about the slow dwindling of humanity as postwar radiation covers the globe.
All very different; all very good.
The Day World series by Phillip Jose’ Farmer.
Truly excellent.
I read almost nothing but dystopian fiction for more than two years, as a sort of thought experiment. I blogged about every one of them, too, right here. I’ve kept up on the reading, but not the blogging - I should start doing that again.
Anyway, I want to add my vote to We. It’s my favorite of that style of classic, Soviet-inspired dytopia. In style (at least in the translation I have), it’s almost romantic.
The Pacific Edge volume is the most convincing utopia I’ve ever read. A much less radical vision than Ecotopia, but plenty radical in its own way. It is set in America after a Green revolution – presumably nonviolent, though details are not given. The economy is mostly private, but business enterprises are not allowed to grow beyond the size where it is possible for every employee/manager to know every other personally; if so, the state intervenes and breaks it up trustbuster style. Everyone is guaranteed an annual income of $10,000 and nobody is allowed to have more than $100,000 – this still leaves plenty of room for ambition and achievement, since “everybody wants to be a Hundred.” Could work, just maybe . . .
As Bertrand Russel wrote in A History of Western Philosophy, Chapter XIV, “Plato’s Utopia”:
Pictures of a Socialist Future is a dystopian novel that was written in 1893. It correctly predicted many of the horrors of 20th century socialism. It is available for free on pdf.
I’ve never heard that called “dystopian” before.