While the world may already feel hopelessly dystopian, these works of classic fiction hold up a mirror with tales of our worst possible futures. Including 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale, here are our Top 10 Classic Dystopian Books to Read.
10 Classic Dystopian Books to Read
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive by any means possible, Cormac McCarthy’s classic dystopian novel The Road is one of the most shocking, harrowing and bleak visions of the future ever created. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love.
The Road is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s page-turning science fiction adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel that became the basis for the tales of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, among so many others. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was at the beginning of the twentieth.
In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier — and whatever alien species are to be found there — will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness.
Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house?
The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Offred lives in The Republic of Gilead. To some, it is a utopian vision of the future, a place of safety, a place where everyone has a purpose, a function. But The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed.
If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire – neither Offred’s nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here.
Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.
You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance – no matter what the cost.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a 1968 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. It tells of the moral crisis of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who stalks almost-human androids in a nuclear fallout-clouded, partially deserted future San Francisco.
Although Blade Runner was loosely based this book, it is in fact a different story, it was more an inspiration than an adaptation.
1984 by George Orwell
Nineteen-Eighty-Four is a novel published by George Orwell in 1949. It was his last work, written shortly before his death in 1950. It presents a dystopian view of a world which has been taken over by totalitarianism. The novel’s main protagonist, Winston Smith, briefly attempts small forms of resistance against the Party, which rules with the figurehead of Big Brother.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean?
A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters.
If you enjoyed our selection of 10 Classic Dystopian Books to Read, check out our reading list 5 Dark Dystopian Novels for the 21st Century
