The best books about dystopias: putting the fun in dysfunctional society

The grandfather of the dystopian novel, Brave New World presented us with a homogenized, mass-produced, sterile world where everyone speaks the same language, has the same beliefs, and are all born from the same artificial wombs. Whereas most dystopian fiction seemed centered around fears of knowledge being banned and removed, Huxley showed us a world filled with people with no desire to attain this knowledge in the first place, people content to fill their time self-soothing themselves with the happiness-inducing drug Soma. Well, Huxley showed us that and orgies, lots of orgies.  

1984, the rare book that both the left and the right side of politics routinely reference, is the top tier of dystopian worlds, a world somehow both completely foreign yet utterly recognizable, like looking into a funhouse mirror that accurately reflects the worst parts of our society back at us. It is a book that is simultaneously claustrophobic and depressing, yet reading it becomes an almost cathartic experience, even as we see so many of its themes becoming more and more present in our everyday life. Never forget that Big Brother is watching, and he has a whole collection of rats that he’s not afraid to use. 

I Am Legend, Matheson’s dystopian horror/sci-fi novel from 1954, imagines a world where a pandemic has decimated society, killing the majority of the population and turning the rest into flesh-eating creatures who just happen to have an unhealthy relationship with the sun, but at its heart, I Am Legend is one of the most impactful stories of human loneliness ever told. We watch our protagonist, Robert Neville, slowly lose hope of ever curing the disease that has ravaged the world while also feeling his pain as every chance of meaningful contact is ripped away from him. Scary, exciting, and utterly hopeless, it somehow leaves you with a slight smile as you read Neville’s ultimate fate. It’s a good thing that a pandemic like that could never happen in the real world. Wait...well no, I haven’t read the news in a while. What’s been going on? 

The most recently published book on my list, 2008’s The Hunger Games, like all good dystopian fiction, presents us with a world that is both insanely different from our own yet entirely recognizable. North America has been split into twelve districts, each with its own specific natural resource, and is ruled over by the Capitol, whose wealthy citizens maintain their privileged lifestyles by exploiting the labor from the districts. In grand Roman gladiator tradition, two children are annually chosen from each district to participate in a widely televised battle royale to the death, serving as both punishment for a past rebellion and as entertainment to pacify the masses. Despite being written for a younger audience, this fact mostly evident in the tacked-on love triangle, it maintains an exciting yet unsettling atmosphere throughout. But for the record, I’m Team Peeta.

A slight cheat on my part, as Watchmen is a graphic novel instead of a prose novel, the almost nihilistic deconstruction of the superhero myth remains a modern classic. Set in an alternate 1980s, an alternate reality whose doomsday clock is bordering on midnight, it’s a broken mirror reflection of a world that is both frighteningly foreign yet uncannily similar to the era of my childhood, an era where nuclear war seemed like an imminent event. The superheroes of Watchmen were no longer super; the villains weren’t that easy to identify, and good and evil became truly subjective ideas, forcing you to ask the novel’s unanswerable question: Who watches the watchmen?