Which Literary Dystopia Is Right For You?

Flavorwire:

Call it society's weirdest guilty pleasure, but lately it seems like there are more apocalyptic fantasies than those of the fairytale variety. From zombies to pandemics, tyrannical dictatorships to machine takeovers -- and plenty of foreboding real world disasters to color in the cracks -- there's no shortage of dystopian futures to choose from.

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Comments

[xiaodashan]

11:23 AM on 07/19/2010

Solyent green-humans turned into wafer thin biscuits

[BlackJAC]

04:45 PM on 07/18/2010

I'd always planned on running one of those Wild West-style free trade zones that always seem to pop up in every post-apocalyptic story such as Tradetown from MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME.

[The Ghoul]

04:16 PM on 07/17/2010

Pretty good list! Looks like I fall into group B, but I've really liked some of the other groups books.

[c-tom]

04:32 PM on 07/15/2010

Where are the novels of J. G. Ballard on this list. For 20 years he wrote novel after novel about the end of the world. Then he published Empire of the Sun.

[Erzsebet Gilbert]

03:39 AM on 07/15/2010

A dystopian novel I highly recommend, which unfortunately isn't that widely read anymore, is "Bend Sinister", by Vladimir Nabokov - it's about a philosopher in a newly revolutionized, dytopic nation, and the man is simultaneously mourning his wife's death, protecting his child, and trying to resist the tyrant with whom he was a schoolboy. It's absurdist and really terrifying at times, and as with all of Nabokov the language is extraordinary. Read it!

[venusflytrap1972]

10:20 AM on 07/15/2010

It's on my parents' shelf, I had no idea it was a dystopia.

Nabokov is one of those authors of whom I should read more.

[Erzsebet Gilbert]

01:28 AM on 07/16/2010

Nabokov is my all-time favorite author; if you enjoy dystopic stories, he has another called "Invitation to a Beheading", which is quasi-dystopic but more surrealistic and absurdist, about a man imprisoned and sentenced to death, but neither he nor the authorities who have charged him know his actual crime...

[BikeFreak]

08:22 PM on 07/14/2010

"The Road" was a great book.

It was one of those stories that once it was done, I had a feeling my views on life had changed a little bit.

[triplettam]

05:53 PM on 07/14/2010

Dahlgren.

[c-tom]

04:28 PM on 07/15/2010

An amazing novel, it was the book that settled for all time the question of if science fiction was literature.

[triplettam]

10:21 PM on 07/19/2010

Yeah, those of us who read good science fiction already knew that, but that book could not be ignored. I don't remember a lot about the novel, but thinking about it really brings back the time and place where I read it and I remember how I felt. Not too many books can do that.

[efmo]

10:55 PM on 07/17/2010

I had forgotten about that book - I read it a long time ago - I found it a challenging read, but interesting, too.

[c-tom]

05:48 PM on 07/14/2010

A Boy and His Dog Don Johnson's best film (he played the boy).

[venusflytrap1972]

10:21 AM on 07/15/2010

Based on a novella by Harlan Ellison.

[efmo]

10:57 PM on 07/17/2010

I had a collection of his stories called "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". I don't remember the individual stories that much (it was a long time ago), but I can still picture the cover of that book. Harlan Ellison also wrote some stories for Star Trek.

[efmo]

10:56 PM on 07/17/2010

I loved that movie - esp. the ending. What a hoot.

[FPhoebe]

04:38 PM on 07/14/2010

Uhh...most of these dystopian novels have been around for decades. A lot of them have just been made into movies that were/are popular. That's why it seems like there are "more" of them. Most people wouldn't know about a book unless it was turned into a movie. However, if one is looking for recommendations for good dystopian movies, Logan's Run was pretty awesome.

I've read at least one book from each of the groupings of which dystopian novel "genre" one may be best suited toward, and I liked them all! The Road depressed me the most though. After I finished the book, I felt like I was dead, it just made me so sad and I felt hopeless. It was weird, I've never had that reaction from a book before. And I Am Legend is a REALLY good book, much better than the movie.

[efmo]

11:03 PM on 07/17/2010

I liked The Road but I found it frustrating, too. I wanted more information, more detail (even though I know the style was chosen deliberately and was very different from other McCarthy novels.) Also, as a mom, I'm not sure I would go and kill myself as long as my son was alive - I kind of felt that was definitely coming from a male author (even though I understand how hopeless things seemed to be, of course.) I liked the movie, too.