The List of Novels already contains More’s Utopia and Orwell’s 1984, two of the best examples of Utopias and Dystopias known to the literary canon. Others also on our list, such as Huxley’s Brave New World or Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, created the perfect world which soon turned into their own visions of hell on earth.
Nevertheless, we can go further into the depths of Dante’s Inferno and find other authors creating true warnings from history. I’m thinking of some of the clearest messengers of Distopias, such as the queen of the apocalypse Margaret Atwood and her trio of doomed societies, The Handmaid’s Tail, Oryx and Crake and the sequel to this latter’s depressing future world The Year of the Flood (Canada), you can also read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (a Russian author who may have inspired Huxley’s work and Vonnegut’s Player Piano), Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut (Slovenia), Ernst Junger’s novella On the Marble Cliffs (Germany), Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie (Congo), Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams (Albania), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (UK), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (US) or Nikos Athanassiadis Î ÎÏα από το ανθÏώπινο (from Greece and only ever translated into French as Au-delà de l’humain).
Each visitor to this site has nine votes to select which of these fearful tales should we add to the List of Novels you might want to read in your life-time if you get half the chance?
This poll is open to everyone – so please tell your friends and family – please feel free to comment once you’ve made your choice.
This poll has now closed