The Best Dystopian Books: 10 Essential Novels of Control, Collapse and Survival
Dystopian fiction covers a wide range of ground. Some of these books imagine a state that watches everything. Others picture what is left after a pandemic, a climate crisis or an unnamed catastrophe has emptied the world out. The common thread is a society that has gone wrong, and a character who notices.
This list is ordered by how much interest our readers show in each title. The selection draws on prize winners (a Pulitzer, an Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Prometheus Award), books ranked on the Modern Library 100 and TIME 100 Novels lists, and New York Times bestsellers that have sold in the millions. Each entry explains what the book is about and what gives it standing in the genre.
1984
Published in June 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's ninth and final completed book. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in Airstrip One, rewriting old newspaper records so that history always matches the Party's current line, while telescreens and the Thought Police watch for any sign of independent thought. Orwell described the book as a satire and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable". It appears on the Modern Library 100, the TIME 100 Novels list and the 100 Novels of All Time, and its vocabulary of Big Brother, Newspeak and unpersons has long outgrown the novel itself.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel's novel moves between the night the Georgia Flu arrives and the Great Lakes region twenty years later, where a nomadic troupe called the Traveling Symphony performs Shakespeare and classical music for scattered settlements. It opens with an actor dying on stage during King Lear, and follows a child from that production, Kirsten, into the world that comes after. Critics singled out the understated quality of Mandel's writing, and the book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015. It had sold 1.5 million copies by 2020 and was adapted into a ten-part HBO Max series in 2021.
Brave New World
Huxley's 1932 novel is set in the World State of AF 632, where citizens are grown in artificial wombs, sorted into castes from Alpha down to Epsilon, conditioned in their sleep to love their place, and kept content by a drug called soma. The order is tested when Bernard Marx brings John, born and raised on a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, back into it. The Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century, and the BBC's Big Read survey placed it at 87. It is often read as the companion piece and inversion of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Parable of the Sower
Butler's 1993 novel takes the form of a journal kept by Lauren Olamina, an African American teenager living behind the walls of a gated community in California as climate change, wealth inequality and corporate greed pull the United States apart. Lauren has hyper-empathy, an involuntary ability to feel what she sees others feel, and she is quietly building a belief system she calls Earthseed, whose first principle is that "God is Change". When the community falls, she walks north and gathers followers. It was a 1994 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and in 2021 readers of The New York Times voted it the top science fiction nomination for the best book of the last 125 years.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange in 1962. It sits on both the Modern Library 100 and the TIME 100 Novels lists, and turns on questions of freedom, morality and state power. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film brought it to a far wider audience, and Burgess later wrote his own stage version, A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, in 1987.
The Hunger Games
In Panem, built on the ruins of North America, the Capitol forces each of its twelve districts to send one boy and one girl to fight to the death on live television. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers in place of her younger sister and goes into the arena alongside Peeta Mellark, a baker's son from her own district. Collins drew on Greek mythology, Roman gladiatorial games and reality television when building the book. It won the California Young Reader Medal, was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year in 2008, and had sold 800,000 copies by February 2010.
Catching Fire
The second book in the series picks up six months after the 74th Games, with President Snow warning Katniss that her defiance in the arena has started to spread through the districts. The 75th Hunger Games are then announced with a twist that pulls surviving victors back into the arena. Reviewers praised Collins's prose, the ending and the development of Katniss's character, and critics have pointed to survival, authoritarianism and rebellion as its central concerns. It has sold more than 19 million copies in the United States alone.
The Road
A father and his young son push a supermarket cart south across an ash-covered America, some years after an unspecified disaster wiped out industrial civilisation and nearly all life. They have a revolver with two rounds, a constant fear of cannibals, and the father's repeated assurance that they are the good guys who are "carrying the fire". McCarthy's novel won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006, and was filmed in 2009 by John Hillcoat.
This Perfect Day
Ira Levin imagines a world run by a central computer called UniComp, which assigns every person their home, job, partner and date of death, and keeps the population compliant through monthly chemical treatments. Everyone wears an identifying bracelet that scanners read to decide where they may go. The real government is a hidden group of long-lived "programmers" who live in luxury underground. Levin won a Prometheus Award for the novel in 1992, and it remains one of only two of his books never adapted for film.
The Iron Heel
Jack London's 1908 novel is framed as a long-lost manuscript, written by Avis Everhard between 1912 and 1932 and annotated centuries later by a historian of the Brotherhood of Man. It describes a rising socialist movement in the United States that is crushed by a corporate-controlled oligarchy known as the Iron Heel, complete with a mercenary army and favoured unions who break ranks with the rest of labour. The framing device reveals from the first page that the revolutionaries fail. It has been cited as an early example of social science fiction and is credited with influencing both Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Read together, these ten books show how much range the genre has, from Edwardian political prophecy to pandemic fiction written in the last decade. Several of them talk to each other directly, so Brave New World alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four, or The Iron Heel ahead of both, makes for a useful pairing.