Hello,

I am a great fan of dystopian and utopian novels. Here are some I've read so far:

1984, G. Orwell
Fahrenheit 451, R. Bradbury
Brave New World, A. Huxley
A Clockwork Orange, A. Burgess
Ambient, J. Womack (just finished reading it, great book!)

Please please, if you know any more books that fit this category, post them here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Animal Farm. (never trust the pigs, they're always the trouble-makers :) )

Craig.

Yes, I love Animal Farm :) Especially the All Pigs are Created Equal, but some Pigs are more Equal than Others part :) I forgot to mention, I also like all the Bradbury short-stories.

I haven't read any Bradbury at all, which is criminal, I know. I should go check out fictionwise, they might have some of his work, possibly at a nice price, too... :)

Craig.

Good topic!

Some additional good "Utopian"/Proto-Cyberpunk novels I read:

Richard Adams - Watership Down
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up / The Shockwave Rider
Suzy McKee Charnas - Walk to the End of the World / The Furies
Thomas Disch - Camp Concentration
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

Btw, check Students for an Orwellian Society (http://www.studentsfororwell.org) to see how close to 1984 this world really is.

Did Huxley do a sequel to Brave New World? I wasn't aware of that.

BTW, it's not a book, but I think the film Brazil fits this category well. It's been years since I saw it, but found it thought-provoking in many ways.

Craig.

Did Huxley do a sequel to Brave New World? I wasn't aware of that.
Brave New World Revisited is not really a sequel, but a critical analysis of Brave New World, how it differs to Orwell's "1984", and the world as Huxley saw it some 30 years after the book debuted.

His commentary and social criticism cut deep, and this cautionary tale is perhaps more applicable today than it has ever been (as evidenced in Bush's reference to Brave New World in his speech concerning government funding of stem cell research).

Tad

Obviously, try Utopia, Thomas Moore.

It is a bit archaic (obviously) it was translated from Latin into English around 1900 (approx) but it is the first Utopian novel. I actually enjoyed it very much, it was really really good and politically very enlightened for someone from the 17th Century.

He has a great deal to say about the system of criminal justice as it was in England. Thieves would be hanged just as quickly as murderers or robbers, so there was very little barrier for the hungry peasaentry to become hard-core criminals. In Utopia criminals were not hanged, they were made to wear gold and to perform public service. Quite enlightened.

Try this site for a definitive list of dystopias:

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/sfclass/Cosycat.htm

Using our new lists feature I just created a list for books based on utopia/dystopia. We might have some other books in our database that could be added. If you know any public domain that could fit this description, I'll be happy to add them to this list !

Link: http://www.feedbooks.com/list/view/3

"Golf in the Year 2000" is a short humorous novel written in 1892. It's about a man who goes to sleep in 1892 and like Rip van Winkle, sleeps until 2000. The novel predicts things like digital watches, bullet trains, women's equality and golf clubs that automatically keep score. It's like "Looking Backward" with a utopia based on golf instead of socialism. :)

I created a Sony Reader version that I'll upload later.

"Golf in the Year 2000" is a short humorous novel written in 1892. It's about a man who goes to sleep in 1892 and like Rip van Winkle, sleeps until 2000. The novel predicts things like digital watches, bullet trains, women's equality and golf clubs that automatically keep score. It's like "Looking Backward" with a utopia based on golf instead of socialism. :)

I created a Sony Reader version that I'll upload later.

Sounds like a lot of fun ! I really need to read this one.

http://www.golf-in-the-year-2000.com/golf2000/index.html

i like windmills when i play golf

any novel about nyc or london should fit this group

Ayn Rand and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Certainly not for the easily susceptible(you don't want to wake up a republican the next morning), but each of the three Novels in my mind, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and The Gulag Archipelago present very distinct Dystopian M.O., but the mother of all Dystopian + Utopian "novels" is my beloved Communist Manifesto, for without it, utopia is merely a platonic musing.

If you're going to read anytihng by Ayn Rand, I would suggest Anthem, which is more directly dystopian, and a lot shorter than anything else. Reading long Rand works is like being shouted at continually for days.

A little dated, but "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis is a tale of fascism coming to the US. There's also Kafka, of course, although I'm not sure that fits what you're looking for...

On the Sci-Fi front, Ira Levin (author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives) wrote a future Utopian/Dystopian novel called This Perfect Day. Very similar in tone to Brave New World. There's also "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", a short story by Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea). It's more of a parable than anything else. She also wrote The Dispossessed, which is a longer exploration of "Utopia"

Oryx and Crake, and the companion novel The Year of the Flood, also by Margaret Atwood.

TadW, here's some off the beaten track...

19th Century Utopian fiction.

Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
The Crystal Button - Thomas Chauncy

20th century Utopian fiction

When The Sleeper Wakes - H G Wells
Beyond This Horizon - Robert Heinlein
The City and the Stars - Arthur C Clarke

"Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner. Especially since it takes place in 2010. The book was clearly a product of its times, but you'll recognize elements of our current times. Not available as an e-book as far as I can tell, but still worth a read.

This perfect day by Ira Levin is indeed a great book on this topic. It seems to me that it is less known than others, and it is not deserved IMO.

Other books, targetted towards a younger audience but very enjoyable for adults are:
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- Uglies and its sequels, by Scott Westerfeld.

My all time favourite Science-Fiction book is 'Candy Man' by Vincent King (no relation to the Candyman movie by Clive Barker) - Sadly out of print but well worth hunting down an old copy. It kicked off my fondness for dystopian novels and I must have reread it half a dozen times.

"This is a remarkable and original novel, A kafka-esque story full of cunning fantasy, enigmatic characters and illusory significance, allied to a devastating concept of our world's future." (from fantasticfiction.co.uk)

Finitude by Hamish MacDonald is just out now. e book and paper handbound editions both.

www.hamishmacdonald.com

This is a new one about espionage after a corporation buys the U.S government
http://www.amazon.com/Turban-Tan-ebook/dp/B003156PWI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1288313607&sr=1-1

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Minority Report (short story), A Scanner Darkly, Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb.

Basically everything of him is dystopian but these are my favorites of his work.

Also a very good read:
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Richard K. Morgan - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies

I just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And while it really was inventive for it's time, I found it not bad, but not satisfying for some reason I still can't figure out. I preferred story presented in movie version(s) (each movie version was somewhat different and worth watching) which was more divergent than different. What I liked about the story was the back story for the earth and people who were essentially left behind...so it's a story well worth reading just don't expect anything like the movie. That's it, the main plot of the written version has a different goal than the movie versions.

BTW, nice revival of an old thread. Good to bring threads like this back from the morgue.

Hopefully it will be released as an ebook soon (only paper and audiobook at the moment), but I would like to suggest Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. It is a compeling read which won both the Hugo and Locus awards for best novel. And of course the granddaddy of them all, Plato's Republic.

If you enjoy a dark and brooding dystopian story I really recommend the BBC/PBS Masterpiece Contemporary "The Last Enemy". Unfortunately it is only available in video format...I have been hunting for a book it might have been based on but nothing has cropped up. But the series pretty much was the sort of story that at one time draws you in and at the same time almost makes you need to run away as fast as you can and not want to think about it again.

The whole series in on YouTube as well as Hulu...even though it's not a book, I suspect many who enjoy this sort of story will enjoy it a fair amount:

http://www.youtube.com/show/thelastenemy
http://www.hulu.com/masterpiece-contemporary

The basic premise plays upon the anxiety, frustration and fear in the post 9/11 world. And even though the UK has been headed in this direction for a while, it takes the process to the extreme levels much like Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in the mood it creates. Also fun for feeding your inner conspiracy theory voice...

Anyway it's also a good example of the sort of dystopian stories I really enjoy...keeps me nice and depressed. :p

Kallocain by the Swedish author and poet, Karin Boye. Available from Amazon.

Our American King by David Lozell Martin was definitely dystopic and strange, but certainly held my interest.

I enjoyed The Devil's Advocate (http://www.amazon.com/Devils-Advocate-Taylor-Caldwell/dp/0884111636) by Taylor Caldwell.

You have a great list started already! Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde was an interesting book that I read recently. Society is based on what color spectrum you can see. It has parallels to 1984. It's planned to be a trilogy.

Seconding The Giver by Lois Lowry. I read it in middle school and enjoyed it greatly.

Try this site for a definitive list of dystopias:

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/sfclass/Cosycat.htm

Whoa. :thanks: