Actually, I seem to remember Linda (John’s mother) as having gained a lot of weight and becoming fairly homely (not that I’m suggesting both go hand-in-hand!).
Here’s an excerpt from the synopsis on Wikipedia:
Re-education, ridding the person of his ‘evil consciousness’ (evil, of course, as defined by the authorities). These are about as dystopian as it gets. I’d also arrgue that any society, no matter what its aims, in which a person’s private thoughts are not their own is dystopian by virtue of that fact alone.
The Terra of Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry series (novels: Ensign Flandry, A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, and A Stone in Heaven; short story collections: *Flandry of Terra *and Agent of the Terran Empire) is a dystopia. And Unan Bator of the novella “A Plague of Masters” is even worse than the Terran Empire.
Many other Anderson novels also feature dystopias.
C.M. Kornbluth’s novel *The Syndic *displays some pretty nasty governments, though the Syndic is an organization of high morale.
Oh, I know, I just said I was kidding because I didn’t want to imply that ugly people=no such thing as paradise. Were all the lower caste people pretty in BNW, anyway?
City by Clifford D. Simak. It’s about a world in which genetically engineered dogs inerit the earth from people.
It’s not a case of a dictatorship adjusting the personality of dissidents. It’s the penalty for murder. How does demolition compare to the death penalty?
Sounds like a step up from strapping them to a gurney and injecting them with poison, and a lot more practical than locking him up in a hole in the ground for the rest of his life. Let’s also keep in mind that the protagonist in The Demolished Man is straight up crazy. His eventual fate doesn’t strike me as any morally worse than court ordered psychiatric care, except that it’s got a much higher success rate than the methods we have today.
I’m also curious about your contention that the existence of mind readers is by itself reason enough to consider a society as a dystopia. If tomorrow, genuine telepaths began appearing, how should society react to that in a way that doesn’t lead to an oppressive, dystopian society?
Don’t be afraid of the label “children’s story” and check out House of Stairs. Although the dystopian part only becomes apparent at the end, where:It turns out the children were being used as guinea pigs in a government experiment in behavioral conditioning
Pretty much anything by PKD.
Half Past Human by T.J. Bass. It’s weird and quirky, but it’s definitely a dystopia.
The sequel is The Godwhale but really they can be read either first, being stand alone novels.
House of Stairs! I remember reading that as a kid. In fact, several years ago, I started a thread inquiring if anybody else remembered it. I don’t think anybody replied.
For other suggestions, how about “the Futurological Convention” by Stanislaw Lem?
I’m so glad you mentioned this; I was honestly thinking I was about the only person on the planet who liked The Postman film, for pretty much exactly the same reasons you did. But I also love the book (it’s one of my favourites), as it has a great story. It’s also less “flag-wavy” than the movie, FWIW.
I hope you have more fun with Never Let Me Go than I did. I gave up a few chapters in when absolutely nothing had happened up until that point.
On the other hand, I love Oryx and Crake and Jennifer Government.
If we can find a third person who liked it, we can start a fan club.
I made no such contention. It would not be the appearance of telepathists that would be alarming, it would be their employment as an arm of the state.
Do you really see no problem with that?
I see all sorts of potential problems with that. But any tool used by the state can be abused. It doesn’t follow that it necessarily will be abused. There’s nothing in The Demolished Man to suggest that the government is oppressive or dictatorial.
Fatherland by Robert Harris is an alternative-history book, set in 1964. Nazi Germany has conquered Europe and severely worn down the Soviet Union, and is engaged in a cold war with the U.S. Hitler is about to have his first summit meeting in Berlin with President Joseph Kennedy when an SS criminal investigator begins looking into the mysterious deaths of senior Nazi Party officials.
A very good, very chilling dystopian novel.
I really like Handmaid’s Tale, but Oryx and Crake felt like the good ideas of other writers, poorly recycled by someone who thought obnoxious videos on the Internet were more significant than they really are.
William Gibson strenuously denies that Neuromancer is a dystopic novel: rather, he claims that it represents how the majority of the world’s population lives, and that we westerners live in a fantasy-utopia on their backs, more or less.
Other recommendations:
-Stephen King’s novella “The Long Walk” has stuck with me ever since I read it in high school. A fascistic state with a hugely popular sport: youth begin a long walk. If you drop below three miles (or so) an hour more than three times within a given time period, you’re shot in the head. The last youth alive wins the race.
-Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomy is a tremendously weird dystopic novel with debts to Metropolis and Alice in Wonderland and 1984. It’s very good, but very grim and weird.
-I’m not quite sure if it qualifies, but I think it does: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the best post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read (and the only one where the apocalypse seemed like a real apocalypse, i.e., not something that gets any better). When the main characters rarely interact with anyone who isn’t a cannibal, that’s not a good society they’re in.
False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Whatever it is, there is – believe it or not – a sequel! Written 38 years after the original!