The Best Dystopian Novels
Last updated: November 14, 2024
Dystopian novels are a form of speculative fiction that imagines a future in which disastrous forces—political, technological or climatological—have changed the world for good. Sometimes these changes might be cataclysmic, leaving society struggling to survive. Other times the changes might be more subtle; these books imagine near-futures in which the consequences of one or two small changes spiral outwards.
Dystopian novels, which are named in reaction to Thomas More's imagined Utopia (1516), share thematic ground with post-apocalyptic novels and science fiction set on Earth. Probably the most famous examples of the genre are Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's 1984.
“The main character of the first book, who is also one of the main characters in the second book, is growing up in this very slow climate-apocalypse-on-Earth society. The US is really falling apart and she is struggling to survive. At the same time, she is looking at the stars and she is creating her own religion, essentially, arguing that our destiny is to go out and colonize the stars. This is an argument that exists in real life, and I criticize it in my book, but I think Butler presents and frames it really well: why someone growing up in a terrible world like this—more terrible than ours but very similar—would still have hope for a future in space. Then, in the second book, Parable of the Talents, the main character’s daughter really presses her on this and says, ‘Is this what we need to be focused on? There are people starving on Earth. Why don’t you pay attention to me, your own daughter, instead of this dream of space?’ And I think those are also questions worth asking.” Read more...
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopia imagines a future in which books and reading have been outlawed, and 'firemen' have been tasked with locating and censoring (burning) all remaining reading material. This bitterly satirical novel was written during the 'Red Scare', in response to the political repression of the McCarthy era. It is widely used as a set-text in high school English departments.
“The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy. Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters.” Read more...
Elliot Ackerman, Military Historians & Veteran
Dreamland
by Rosa Rankin-Gee
Rosa Rankin-Gee's eerie second novel is set in a near-future England in which the south coast is in the process of being claimed by rising sea levels. This looming crisis serves as a backdrop to a tenderly-told love story between Chance, a teenage girl living in poverty in crumbling Margate, and Franky, a middle-class humanitarian worker with a mysterious past. Dreamland is currently in the process of being adapted into a six-part series by the BBC.
“The Parable of the Sower is the origin story of Lauren Oya Olamina, who has this disability of feeling other people’s feelings. Her boundaries are really gone. She’s suffering from this disease and living in a gated community, as the world around the gated community slowly crumbles away. I think that one of the things that makes it so compelling is not just that there are these horrible things happening, but that they are horrible things that are not that far removed from what’s going on now.” Read more...
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Annihilation
by Jeff Vandermeer
“I like that Annihilation is set on a planet that’s very recognizably Earth, but also frighteningly different. We may not all turn into monsters, but I suspect the future might be weirder than we realise.”
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Kate Marvel, Scientist
“Like all great science fiction, it has the underlying themes that make you think and retain their relevance decades later.” Read more...
“It’s the quintessential Cold War story. It’s utterly haunting. It captures so well the madness of MAD: mutually assured destruction.” Read more...
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
🎧 Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award for a truly exceptional audiobook
“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because…he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now. He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies. Orwell saw the death of the dream at first-hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises. His hero Winston is named, of course, after Winston Churchill” Read more...
Amanda Craig, Journalist
“It’s been hyped as the next big thing. They’re making a movie; it’s selling massive numbers of copies in America, and that’s how I came to it. As a commercially minded author I always look at what they’re doing and why they’re successful and I’m very often quite disappointed. In a way this is a more action-based version of Noughts and Crosses.” Read more...
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Noughts and Crosses
by Malorie Blackman
It’s set in a society where it’s a reverse South Africa and the blacks are quite dominant and the white people are slaves, and then you’ve got these star-crossed lovers, a black girl and a white boy…
“It’s a really strange novel…it’s on my list because I’ve never seen anything like it. The words in the title, they’re animals, but they actually refer to people. One of them, Crake, is a scientist, a genetic engineer; and essentially, he’s a sort of evil villain character. He’s really, really interesting. He engineers a great pandemic, which wipes out most of the world. And he is in a relationship with this very ethereal woman, who we never really get to know very well, who is known as Oryx. It’s a difficult book to summarise, because it’s very hallucinatory and weird! Every aspect of it is brighter than life, somehow. The basic plot follows a man who in the narrative present is called the Snowman, and he lives in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s surrounded by these very innocent humans who seem a lot like the Eloi in The Time Machine by HG Wells” Read more...
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
🏆 Winner of the 1987 Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction
Published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale is a haunting epistolary novel narrated by Offred, a woman living in a future America where environmental and societal breakdown have led to the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. In Gilead, women have been stripped of their fundamental rights and reduced to their reproductive potential. Lesbians and other 'gender outlaws' are executed, as are doctors who conduct abortions.
The Handmaid's Tale was recognised as a modern classic and first adapted into a film in 1990. It reappeared in the headlines (and the bestseller lists) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s US electoral victory, after which time the handmaid's bonnet became an icon of the feminist protest movement. More recently it was adapted as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss, who also narrates the audiobook of The Handmaid's Tale.
The sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is The Testaments, set 15 years later.
“Atwood takes all the hard information about gender inequality that she sees around her and then turns it up a few notches.” Read more...
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Catherine Mayer, Politician
