Dystopian Science Fiction

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You mean that was non-fiction?

I think Fahrenheit 451 is the dystopian fiction that has come closest to reality. OK, we don't burn books, but The Family are all but real now. 1984 is wide of the mark (thank goodness), as is the Handmaid's Tale (likewise). I haven't read Brave New World.

More recent dystopian fiction like Ready Player One, The End Specialist, and Wool, is still set in the future.

Okay, I sort of stumbled with my wording there. I meant to say fiction in literature.

I found John Christopher's "The Death of Grass" particularly scary because it seems so plausible: a virus is destroying all grasses (including rice and wheat) and the threat is just plain starvation. The West looks on as the threat starts in the East and society starts to fall apart as the virus spreads...

I also remember vividly J G Ballard's "The Drowned World", Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog", George Stewart's "Earth Abides" and Russell Hoban's "Ridley Walker"

...and a couple of books from my childhood that helped build my love for SF: H G Wells' "War of the Worlds" and John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids" (the plague of blindness was much more frightening than the walking plants...)

Thanks for the list, Stardraigh!

Never read 1984. George Orwell's style is too simple. I found that out after reading Animal Farm. EVERYONE knows that 1984 is really just a thinly veiled allegory for the soviets. However I did read Fahrenheit 451 and found it to be just as perceptive and quite as in depth as I had expected it to be. There are a lot of books posted here that I haven't heard about, so i will have to check them out. Just out of curiosity, what is it about dystopias in particular that attracts everyone? Come to think of it, I barely know the genre. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I'm attracted to dystopias for, I guess, the same reason I'm attracted to any sci-fi- the "what if?" question.

If we put cameras in people's homes, we could detect domestic abuse very easily. But 1984 comes along and points out the whopping flaws.

If we become more and more attached to virtual reality, we could end up in a situation like Fahrenheit 451, or else Ready Player One (though to be honest Ready Player One is actually quite attractive). What would that mean for society at large? Both books explore that, and come to quite different conclusions- I happen to think Ready Player One is closer to the mark, but then it has the advantage of being written further in the future.

What if we ended death? The End Specialist, that's what.

Wool is a classic of the genre in that it is a dystopia that everyone born after 1945 has probably imagined at some point, but that has never really been done justice. It is a dystopia within a dystopia, and is done excellently.

Then, of course, dystopian fiction just happens to be a lot of the best fiction. Dick and Bradbury are two of the finest writers of the age, and their shorts came at the dystopia from so many different angles. HG Wells wrote dystopian fiction when he was essentially giving birth to sci-fi. Pratchett, Murakami, Asimov, Attwood, so many great authors from varied backgrounds have written dystopian fiction that it is difficult not to like it.

I don't really know how to answer this with clarity but I'll try. I think for me it's the what-if situations that question things about our world and human nature even if the setting and plot elements are in another time & space. Also, I think for me the idea of gaming things out factors in which I enjoy doing. I don't really have anyone to do that with, and it's something I enjoy so I take it where I can get it, even if it's one sided and me reading a book. Dystopian fiction usually has both of those as components. Somewhere the author came up with a what-if this occured, and gamed it out. I can now get a glimpse of something I never thought of before, and add it to my imagination.

Interest in dysoptia also seems to peak during times of dramatic threatening change. Here in Australia there was a huge explosion of dystopian fiction in the late 19th century because of the perceived threat of Asian immigration to Australia. Ah, racism and xenophobia. These days we've had lots of scares to inspire stuff like the zombie craze, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and The Road, Elysium etc. There's been outbreaks of new conditions like swine and bird flu, western immigration concerns, financial collapses, terrorism and increasing wealth disparity, climate change. This is a boon time for dystopian writing/directing etc.

If anybody needs a quick fix...

This made me smile.
http://escapepod.org/2013/12/27/ep428-paradise-left/

Yes, the movie seems to be set in a shopping mall which I always found weird. When I shop in old malls and get lost I feel like Sandmen are going to track me down and take me to Carousel because I'm over 30 and shouldn't be there.

I love that movie. I haven't read the books, but I find if fascinating.

Any fiction historians on here? I'd like to know when dystopian futures got started in science fiction. Was it HG wells with the Time Machine (although that's a bit of a weak example.) What I mean to say is, was there a time when the future was bright and shiny, and then after this certain story was published, the future turned dark. And what is it with future governments always being fascist?

One exception that comes to mind, is Cordwainer Smith, who wrote stories far into the future, and it's neither bleak nor happy.
Just very odd indeed.

I am working on a dystopian novel currently, themed around future wars and chaos caused by global warming, water and other resource scarcity, social inequality, corporate control and capitalism gone mad, U.S. imperialism, religious sectarianism etc., set c.2050.

To me, what's so appealing about dystopian science fiction is the 'what if' element, like in all science fiction, but applied to negative situations: what if there was a nuclear winter? What if a totalitarian government came to power? What would happen if inequality did get to be like Blade Runner/ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In my opinion, the most likely kind of dystopia we will experience in the future is somewhere between Brave New World and Ambient by Jack Womack.

-The Earth abides by George R Stewart was pretty good. It's about what happens after a disease wipes out most of humanity, and we're forced to start again. The only problem being that just about everyone left is NT. It captures really well, what it feels like to be doomed by other peoples stupidity.

There's plenty of dystopian fiction dating back to ancient greece, but I don't know of much that is futurist.

Here are a few early ones that I am aware of:

The book of, Revelations, is an early work of future dystopian fiction, you might not have considered

The Last Man-(1825), by Mary Shelley is about a future global pandemic.




Science fiction futures are usually fascist, though here are two I've read that aren't:

Seven Days in New Crete-(1949) is a rare science fiction novel, by the author of I,Claudius. It describes the structure of matriarchal future society in detail, and it is not dystopian or fascist.

The Day of the Triffids-(1951). Is about an atmospheric weapons malfunction that leaves almost the entire population of earth blind, which leaves them vulnerable to carnivorous plants. It depicts many small scale social orders, not all of them fascist.

Haven't read Ambient, and my library doesn't have it. The description on Amazon sounds a little like Darusha Wehm's novels, except she has less violence: http://podiobooks.com/contributor/m-darusha-wehm/. If you care about keeping things in chronological order, listen to the Andersson Dexter novels in this order:
Self Made
Act of Will
The Beauty of Our Weapons
Beautiful Red is set in the same world, but a separate story.

If you like the stories, do pay for them. Podiobooks advertises that it offers free audio novels, but that strikes me as bad advertising. If people don't pay, the authors get nothing, and the site owner can't pay for the bandwidth and will have to shut down.

If you want violence along with your dystopia, read Altered Carbon, and other work by Richard K. Morgan.

My personal favorites are The Goodness Gene by Sonia Levitin and Virtual War by Gloria Skurzynski, the latter being the first dystopian novel I ever read. I feel that the bittersweet endings combined with the characters contemplating/being exposed to different views of the world around them as they developed were what clinched them for me; it wasn't entirely doom and gloom (but they may have leaned more towards futurism than dystopia. I haven't read them in quite some time, so I can't fully remember...) I was fond of Fahrenheit 451 in high school, 1984 not so much...

Brave New World feels a little close to reality, but not by much.

As for recent titles, I really like The Hunger Games (I'm hoping to finish the series once I'm on break again.), but disliked Divergent. I don't know about the latter; it just felt unrealistic, and the narration seemed way to tell-y for my liking.

There is Shin Sekai Yori (From The New World) that changed the way I look dystopian science-fiction. Sadly the novel is not translated in english (or french), so I only know it through the anime adaptation. http://www.crunchyroll.com/shin-sekai-yori-from-the-new-world
It's about what kind of society have been built 1000 years in the future to avoid tragedy while peoples can use psychic powers. It's not pretty.