Anti-Utopian Literature
George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and others
These five dystopian novels will give any reader the chills: all of them predict bleak controlled futures: some may hit too close to home for your own comfort.
All of these novels paint bleak pictures of the future, commenting on where our modern-day society may be going dreadfully wrong. A good place to start if you are interested in Anti-Utopian or Dystopian Literature.
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury: Many American students first came across this book when it was assigned to them in high school, but this short, eerily spare novel deserves another read. Fahrenheit 451 is about a fireman whose only job is to burn books, in a hedonistic future America devoid of critical thinking or literature. Ray Bradbury has stated that the book, written entirely on a pay typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library, is really about how television was eroding critical thought in America. The main character, Guy Montag, falls in love with a societal outcast and begins to question his societies values, eventually leading him to steal and hide books he was sent to destroy . . .
- 1984, George Orwell: This classic of dystopian literature, responsible for spawining a number of catch phrases such as "Big Brother" and "Orwellian," depicts a bleak future (now past) England where all power is in the hands of the shadowy figure of Big Brother, and all citizens are watched constantly by the television screens in their homes. The main character, Winston Smith, is an employees of the Ministry of Truth, whose job is to distribute all information as well as tracking down and destroying references to events or people who have fallen afoul of the party apparatus. Winston falls in love with a fellow worker, Julia, entering into a forbidden realtionship and eventually falling afoul of the state apparatus . . .
- We, Yevgeniy Zamyatin: Often considered the grandfather of dystopic literature, We depicts a society where everyone is assigned a number instead of a name, lives in a city entirely made of glass and cut off from nature, and maintains a their daily routine according to mathematical equations, all under the auspices of "The Benefactor," a Big Brother-like figure. The protagonist, D-503, falls in love with I-330 and begins to lose faith in a society that he once championed . . .
- A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: Aldous Huxley's influential novel depicts a society where humanity is healthy, care-free, hedonistic and advanced due to genetic engineering, the elimination of poverty and warfare, and recreational drug use--especially the use of the powerful drug Soma, which serves to erase bad memories and dull unwanted pain. The world, created around the tenets of Henry Ford. A Brave New World is hilariously tongue-in-cheek, but its commentary on society and the direction it is headed in is scathing and still seems searingly relevant.
- Elvissey, Jack Womack: Author Jack Womack goes so far as to invent an amped-up, futuristic English for this novel about a bifurcated world where two separate realities exist: one is a consumerist nightmare where DryCo, a massive global conglomorate, seeks absolute power over everything, and the environment and pollution have spiraled out of control, threatening to bury the city of New York beneath the waves. The other is an alternate United States where Abraham Lincoln was never born, the Civil War never took place, and slavery was not abolished until 1905. Thus, the novel depicts tow dystopias: one based on our own historical version of events, and another, "what-if" world that posits how things might have been, if things had turned out just a little differently . . . part of the DryCo Quartet of novels.
The copyright of the article Anti-Utopian Literature in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Ray Nayler. Permission to republish Anti-Utopian Literature must be granted by the author in writing.
