Twenty-Five Favorite Dystopian Novels
(I tend to regard dystopian fiction as a sibling to apocalyptic fiction, except taking place in the wake of a profound speculative social cataclysm rather than a profound speculative environmental one. Certainly, in the Venn diagram of catastrophe literature, there’s a large shared space between them, so maybe even a conjoined sibling. For a companion list to this one, then, you might take a look at my 25 favorite works of apocalyptic literature. I’ve arranged these 25 (okay, 26, courtesy of Octavia Butler) books in order of publication date.)
The Trial by Franz-Kafka (1925)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
Return from the Stars by Stanisław Lem (1961)
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D. G. Compton (1974)
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard (1975)
The Long Walk by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman (1979)
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (1980)
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
Animals by Don LePan (1993)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (1993 and 1998)
Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa (1997)
Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua (1997)
Feed by M. T. Anderson (2002)
Joseph Walser’s Machine by Gonçalo M. Tavares (2004)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson (2005)
The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist (2006)
The Situation by Jeff VanderMeer (2008)
Meeks by Julia Holmes (2010)
Pills and Starships by Lydia Millett (2014)
The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips (2015)
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)
The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel (2021)
— October 7, 2021