Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn.
The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed!
Anywhoodles. Here goes:
Dystopian Literature Worth Reading
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993)
- 1984 by George Orwell (1948)
- 334 by Thomas M. Disch (1972)
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
- The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett (1955)
- Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994)
- It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
- The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
- The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)
- The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (2013)
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
- Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
- Swastika Night by Murray Constantine (1937)
- Palestine +100 edited by Basma Ghalayini (2019)
- The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector (1949)
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (2017)
- Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962)
- The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (1953)
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
- Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac (2015)
- “Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick (1956)
- V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (1990)
- American War by Omar El Akkad (2017)
- The Giver by Louis Lowry (1993)
- The Assault by Reinaldo Arenas (1992)
- We by Yegeny Zamyatin (1924)
- Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch (1968)
- High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975)
- Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
Suggested Reading
Suggestions for this section most welcome! The works in this section are far from perfect. Read. Learn. Critique.
- A Very Short Introduction to Fascism by Kevin Passmore (2014)
- The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton (2004)
- “Ur-Fascism (or, Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt)” by Umberto Eco (1995)
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)
- Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire (1950)
- The Nature of Fascism by Roger Griffin (1993)
- The New Authoritarians by David Renton (2019)
- Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (1952)
- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (2017)
- Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reid Ross (2017)
- How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018)
- A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 by Stanley G. Payne (1995)
- Fascists by Michael Mann (2004)
- The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right by Enzo Traverso (2019)
- The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi (1965)
- Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction by Arundhati Roy (2020)
- Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit (2016)
