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Dystopian book recommendations
I'm looking for dystopian book suggestions. I read The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner as a young adult and would like some recommendations (YA or Adult).
Thank you!
I'm looking for dystopian book suggestions. I read The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner as a young adult and would like some recommendations (YA or Adult).
Thank you!
I'm old, so I highly recommend 1984.
Also Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Scythe trilogy by Neal Schusterman (YA)
The Giver (YA)
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I read both Parable books earlier this month and wow, they hit so hard, especially at this time (politically). Highly recommend both of them!
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Be prepared for a lack of quotation marks in the dialogue.
And to have whatever hope you had for humanity continually ground down until you emerge from the back cover completely numb.
10/10
Severance by Ling Ma. It's akin to The Last of Us, insofar as it's a fungus-based zombie apocalypse, except that it's also a criticism of modern capitalism.
Great suggestion! I read Severance last year and loved it. I'm right in the millennial age group it seems directed towards. I also thought it oddly prophetic considering the subject matter, it echoed things I went through during the pandemic as well.
In the same vein, albeit much more graphic and less dystopian and more horror, it reminded me very much of Stephen King's The Stand, which I didn't know even existed until last April. It seems lesser known than many of his other iconic novels, (Carrie, IT, Misery, etc.) that I've personally deemed it one of the greatest underappreciated American horror novels.
Someone already suggested The Handmaid's Tale, so I'll throw out Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood too
Anthem by Ayn Rand is a really quick read and very dystopian, one of the most dystopian books I've ever read. If you don't know anything about Ayn Rand just know she's very politically divisive and responsible for much of the individualist ideas prevalent today. Her ideas are radical and exaggerated, but I think she's an important author to read. It's a shame she needs such a caveat.
It has inspired other media like Rush's rock opera 2112, if you're into that sort of thing as well.
You can skip Atlas Shrugged lol
Wool by Hugh Howey - Set in a post apocalyptic world where the remnants of mankind tries to survive in a silo beneath the ground.
I recently picked these up after watching the show. Really keen to get into them. If the show has stayed close to the books then I'll be happy.
I haven't watched season 2 yet, but season 1 is pretty wildly different from the books (I read them a couple months ago after watching season 1 first). I thought it was SUPER interesting to see how the adaptation rearranged things to make for better television.
Yea I guess that would make sense. Well that does make reading the books a nice change to the show.
Someone else has described it as they are heading to the same direction by different means and from what I can recall from first two books I get the same sense. And I would argue it’s for the better because I gave up during the second book out of frustration and I’ve been meaning to get back into it ever since finishing season two of the show.
Yeah that rings true for me based on season 1 at least
Snow Crash is really good. It's one of the OG cyberpunk style books so by default it's dystopian. The book starts with a weird monologue where the main character, calling himself "the deliverator", describes his job as a pizza delivery guy. Dystopia is more the backdrop of the story than the point of it.
CW that there's an age-gap relationship that I found pretty uncomfortable (though was definitely more common in early 90s fiction)
Ya... by that point I forgot she was that young. I think it is supposed to be a bit weird though, it says something about both of them. It could have just as easily been cut though.
You omitted my favorite detail about Snowcrash – the main character's name is Hiro Protagonist. It's a great book.
Arguably, animal farm
Does Lord of the Flies count, too?
I’d say so
To stray from the classics a bit:
Jasper Fforde - Shades of Grey (and its sequel, Red Side Story)
It's a whole lot of fun, as far as dystopias go.
Days of Hate by Ales Kot and Danijel Žeželj. Stealing from a Goodreads review: "In the United States, 2022, two women are on opposite sides of the struggle against the ruling white supremacist police state."
Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark. Stealing from Wikipedia: "...set in a bleak future a number of decades from now after the current world order has broken down, possibly due to climate change. Sixteen families each control the territory, resources, and technology in their part of the world, as per mutual agreement, though each family has their own technological strengths and may govern their territory through differing methodology"
Blind Faith and This Other Eden, both by Ben Elton - he's mostly known as a comedian, but I enjoyed these books, he may have also written other dystopias I've not read. Both feature climate change as the backdrop in case that will affect your enjoyment.
Blind Faith is a disturbingly prescient take (from 2007) on a hyper-religious, hyper-social-media ("only perverts do things in private"), antivaxxer dystopia.
This Other Eden is more simply about the climate and doesn't hit quite so close to reality.
Current events aren't enough for you? :-)
I recently was recommended Jennifer Government, and it's a very different take on dystopian, and fast paced and fun. It's a book that really 'commits to the bit.'
I enjoyed that book, rare to find it mentioned in the wild I think!
Additionally, since no one else has mentioned them yet:
WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Machine Stops by EM Forster
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Flow My Tears The Policeman Said by Philip K Dick (and everything else he wrote...)
The Time Machine by HG Wells (also When the Sleeper Wakes)
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Colossus by DF Jones
And though you didn't ask, some excellent dystopian films:
Serious films:
THX1138
Soylent Green
Code 46
Fun Films:
Blade Runner
Mad Max
Brazil
Sleeper
Zardoz
Seen a few classics mentioned so why not: I Am Legend
Short read, very different to the movie that came out in the 2000. Set the stage for modern dystopian fiction. Mixed critical reception but I personally really enjoyed it.
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. It's rather dated in terms of racist language, and a bit environmentalist hippie, but the presentation is pretty great.
The Sheep Look Up is the sequel to Stand on Zanzibar, another good one.
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. It basically predicted current events.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel is a good one. Arguably not dystopian because the overall tone is more hopeful, but it has all the fall of civilization and post-collapse violence stuff, so I think it counts.
I haven't read them in about 30 years, so maybe they're not as good as I remember, but I really enjoyed the Tripods series by John Christopher and I never hear anyone mention them anymore.
The most recent one that I enjoyed a lot is Paul Auster's "In the Country of Last Things"
I found this book to be the most realistic dystopian future I've come across.
From Goodreads: "A dystopian epistolary novel. In the Country of Last Things takes the form of a letter from a young woman named Anna Blume to a childhood friend. Anna has ventured into an unnamed city that has collapsed into chaos and disorder. In this bleak environment, no industry takes place and most of the population collects garbage or scavenges for objects to resell. City governments are unstable and are concerned only with collecting human waste and corpses for fuel. Anna has entered the city to search for her brother William, a journalist, and it is suggested that the Blumes come from a world to the East which has not collapsed."
OP if there are particular subsets of dystopian you're looking for -
Ecological
Post apocalyptic
Faux Utopian
Specifically dystopian government or just a bad world to live in (see also post apocalyptic)
Stories where the dystopian element is overthrown
I could recommend a dozen more but some wouldn't land as "Dystopian" depending on the label.
I might suggest Super Sad True Love Story. It's set in the near-future and extrapolates a world where social media has run amuck. I recommended it to a friend who complained "none of the characters were likeable", and while I get that criticism, something about that book really struck a chord with me. If our future is super narcissistic because of social media, would I expect to like anyone in that future? :)