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When Jeremy Bentham coined the word ‘cacotopia’ meaning ‘worst place’ in the early 19th century, it didn’t really stick. But since John Stuart Mill used the word dystopia in a parliamentary speech in 1868 the concept of an ‘anti-utopia’ has been lodged in the cultural imagination. Speculation about the future of planet earth and human society has become a perennial obsession in film, television and fiction, from the classic disaster movie to Dr Who, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The word dystopian has been used to describe any fictional account of a bleak future but imagining a time when things are less than perfect is not, necessarily, imagining a dystopia. According to the the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, a dystopia is a utopia in reverse, a place that promises ideal social and political conditions but instead produces the opposite – a place where things are not only imperfect but badly so, causing widespread harm to the population. Post-apocalyptic situations portrayed in film or literature are not necessarily dystopian, just as dystopian situations are not necessarily post-apocalyptic. They can be, but they needn’t be. An apocalypse can herald a dystopian future but equally it can lead to a group of people simply trying to survive. Similarly, a dystopia can emerge without a disaster having taken place. A speculative piece of fiction is only dystopian when it describes the social and political conditions in which the characters exist. This often means the presence of a government or other controlling organisation, whose aims are utopian, but who end up instead causing more harm than good. A bad situation where civilisation has been reduced to violence and disorder is not dystopian without this important element.

*I wanted to make a list of dystopian novels because I was curious about reading more of them but I got a bit obsessed and collected the names of over 40 novels (listed here in chronological order). I wrote the above because I wanted to get it straight in my own head about what the difference was between the often conflated terms post-apocolyptic and dystopian. Whilst coming up with the list of dystopian novels I had to discount those that I discovered were post-apocalyptic, so I also have also included a limited list of novels that fall into that category. Having also found a number of works of utopian fiction I’ve included a separate list for those too. I expect that I have made some errors, as I have only read some of the novels below and have based my categorization mostly on blurbs.

Dystopias:

A Story of the Days to Come by H.G. Wells (1897)

The Iron Heel by Jack London (1907)

The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells (1910)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou (1925)
(The novella that inspired Fritz Lang’s classic film)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
see also by the same author: Ape and Essence (1949)

Anthem by Ayn Rand (1937)
see also by the same author: Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (1937)

For more dystopian literature inspired by Nazi Germany see:
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962) and The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad (1972)

Kallocain by Karin Boye (1940)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (1952)

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick (1956)

Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley (1960)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep by Philip K. Dick (1968)

Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch (1968)

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
see also by the same author: Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009)

In The Country of Last Things by Paul Auster (1987)

The Children of Men by P.D. James (1992)

Vurt by Jeff Noon (1993)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993)
see also by the same author: Parable of the Talents (1998)

Virtual Light (1993), Idoru, (1996) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) by Williams Gibson (The Bridge Trilogy)

see also by the same author: The Sprawl trilogy - Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

The Paper Eater by Liz Jensen (2000)

Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson (2005)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (2007)

A Journal of the Flood Year by David Ely (2009)

Sleepless by Charlie Huston (2010)

Edge by Thomas Blackthorne (2010)


Apocalyptic/Post Apocalyptic futures:

After London by Richard Jefferies (1885)
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)
see also by the same author: The Chrysalids (1955)
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard (1962)
see also by the same author: The Drought (1965)
The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing (1969)
see also by the same author: The Memoirs of  Survivor (1974)
The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (1977)
Blindness by Jose Saramago (1995)
The Flood by Maggie Gee (2004)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
The Rapture by Liz Jensen (2009)


Utopian visions:

Republic by Plato (approx 380 BC)
Utopia by Thomas More (1516)
The City of the Sun by Thomas Campanella (1602)
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (1624)
Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)
News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890)
A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells (1905)
Herland by Charlotte Gilman Perkins (1915)
Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves (1949)
Island by Aldous Huxley (1962)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
A Few Things I Know About Whileaway (1974) and The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five by Doris Lessing (1980)
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (1987)
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper (1988)
Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson (1990)
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk (1993)
3001: A Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (1997)