The best books by women imagining dark, dystopian futures

This is the novel that inspired whole shelves in the bookshops of recent women’s dystopian fictions (note how often their covers mimic the red and white of the handmaid’s uniform!) 

I write about Atwood a lot, and I'm most often asked to talk about this book. No matter how many times I return to The Handmaid’s Tale, I find something new to think about. 

Atwood took what was an often male-focused genre (think George Orwell’s 1984) and reimagined it from a woman’s perspective. For me, the most terrifying thing about Offred’s story is how ordinary she is – how she’s just trying to keep her head down and survive. When the government was overthrown, she watched it on TV and did nothing, like most of us would.

If you only know this book from the Hulu TV series, I urge you to go back to the novel: it's extraordinary.

This is the first book I ever read by Butler and it remains my favourite. Butler’s vision of near-future America is one of climate crisis, economic collapse, and social anarchy. The scenes of violence and degradation are terrifying.

What I love about this novel is how Butler creates a true hero – visionary, determined, and inspirational – in Lauren, a teenage girl. Written as a journal, the protagonist’s youth can be heard in her language ("I hate being a kid," she complains), but Butler has every faith in her as an extraordinary leader. In many ways, it’s a classic quest novel, as Lauren’s followers head north in search of safety; it’s also an attempt to articulate a new way of thinking about the earth and our relationship to it.

Butler uses elements familiar to dystopian writing, and the novel reminds me of many others, but it somehow manages to be entirely unique at the same time.

I was recommended this novel by one of my students and loved it instantly. It has all the features you might expect of a dystopia: environmental damage, scant resources, and an authoritarian government controlling where people live, work, and travel.

I research contemporary women’s writing and the history of feminism, and I love Hall’s focus on how future dystopian scenarios might specifically affect women. Facing a world where women’s reproduction is controlled by the state, Hall’s narrator runs away to join a rebel women’s stronghold in the Cumbrian hills.

The experience is anything but gentle and sisterly; Hall is brilliant on both the brutal landscape of the north and the strength and violence of female resistance.

In a list of dystopian futures, Mackintosh’s book sits a little unsurely. It’s a dreamy, otherworldly novel, and we’re never quite sure when or where it’s taking place. Three sisters live in isolation with their parents, avoiding an outside world ravaged by contagion – but is the threat real or imagined?

I love this book for its strangeness: it’s an uncanny fairy tale, partly set in some kind of decrepit Victorian seaside retreat for lady hysterics, partly set in the woods where wolves (or men) may prowl.

Mackintosh builds layered dystopias, where both the diseased, brutal world of male violence and the claustrophobic, emotionally manipulative "care" of home and family threaten the sisters’ security. This hazy fever-dream of a book stayed with me for a long time after I finished it. 

This is another book I came to via teaching; looking for new ecofictions, I put out a call on twitter and this title kept being mentioned by people I trust. When I read it, I was blown away by Hunter’s slim, powerful novel.

With the South of England underwater, Britons are forced to flee north to displacement camps, suddenly finding themselves fighting in supermarkets for supplies and walking the roads with their children.

I first read it for its depiction of eco-catastrophe and refugee crisis and its fascinating echoes of the fuel and food shortages of the pandemic. But as I reread it each year, I more insistently see it as a book depicting new motherhood as a crashing, overwhelming flood from which one emerges perhaps a year later, a haunted, dazed survivor.