10 Must-Read Dystopian Novels: Our Readers’ Picks

While not all sci­ence fic­tion is dystopian—far from it—a ques­tion does arise when the sub­ject of that most pes­simistic of gen­res comes up: is all dystopi­an lit­er­a­ture sci­ence fic­tion? In a post a cou­ple days ago, we brought you five of Antho­ny Burgess’s favorite dystopi­an nov­els, a list that would seem to answer with a resound­ing No. For one thing, Burgess includes what we might count as his­tor­i­cal fic­tion on his list—Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Is Orwell’s 1984 sci­ence fic­tion? It makes more sense, per­haps, to call it polit­i­cal satire, or “spec­u­la­tive fic­tion,” the term dystopi­an nov­el­ist Mar­garet Atwood prefers.

In the intro­duc­tion to her essay col­lec­tion In Other Worlds, Atwood defines “spec­u­la­tive fic­tion” as “real­is­tic and plau­si­ble” where­as sci­ence fic­tion con­tains more fan­tas­tic ele­ments. Hair­split­ting maybe, but for Atwood it means that dystopias—at least her dystopias—are not sim­ply philo­soph­i­cal thought exper­i­ments divorced from lived real­i­ty, like much utopi­an fic­tion. They are pro­jec­tions, and at times imag­i­na­tive tran­scrip­tions, of the present, show­ing us what may already be hap­pen­ing right under our noses, or what might be right around the cor­ner.

As Burgess wrote of 1984, “It is pos­si­ble to say that the ghast­ly future Orwell fore­told has not come about sim­ply because he fore­told it: we were warned in time.” In oth­er words—the total­i­tar­i­an future Orwell fore­saw was entire­ly pos­si­ble in Eng­land and Amer­i­ca, and need­less to say, already large­ly a real­i­ty in places like Stalin’s Sovi­et Union and cur­rent-day North Korea. In our Burgess post, we asked our read­ers to name their favorite dystopi­an nov­els (or films). How­ev­er we define dystopia—as dark futur­ist fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, or “spec­u­la­tive fic­tion” about nasty things on the verge of com­ing to pass, we’ll nev­er lack for exam­ples.

The list of nov­els below below offers a range of futur­is­tic tales, some more real­is­tic and plau­si­ble, some more fan­tas­tic. Like Burgess, read­ers had a broad def­i­n­i­tion of “dystopi­an” as a genre. I was sur­prised, how­ev­er, that no one men­tioned any of Atwood’s excel­lent nov­els, so I’ll throw in both Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale as my picks.

• We, by Yevge­ny Zamy­atin
• Dahlgren, by Samuel R. Delany
• The Road, by Cor­mac McCarthy
• Mar­ket Forces, by Richard K. Mor­gan
• Nev­er Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishig­uro
• A Can­ti­cle for Lei­bowitz, by Wal­ter M. Miller Jr.
• In the Coun­try of Last Things, by Paul Auster
• The Iron Heel, by Jack Lon­don
• The Gate to Wom­en’s Coun­try, by Sher­ri S. Tep­per
• This Per­fect Day, by Ira Levin

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Clock­work Orange Author Antho­ny Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopi­an Nov­els: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness