The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless mind,...
In the decade following its completion in 1909, New York's once-tallest building, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, suffered a series of unfortunate mishaps. In rapid succession it was exposed to poisonous...
A Utopian vision in which the title character leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes dictator of America.
The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell',...
When but a child of seven my uncle placed me in a private school in which one of the so-called redeemed sub-sailors was a teacher of the German language. As I look back now, in the light of my present knowledge,...
Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella by Ayn Rand, first published in 1938. It takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age as a result of the evils of irrationality...
Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction)....
In or about the year 2000, humanity has reached "that incredibly lofty goal to which its intrinsic efforts can carry it" — but rejected everything but crass materialism. Technology has advanced to the point...
The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a novel written by G. K. Chesterton in 1904, set in a nearly-unchanged London in 1984. Though the novel deals with the future, it concentrates not on technology nor on totalitarian...
The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime. According...
The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern Dystopian," it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny...
The Sleeper Awakes is H. G. Wells's wildly imaginative story of London in the twenty-second century and the man who by accident becomes owner and master of the world. In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into...
The sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues...
This is Metropolis, the novel that the film's screenwriter -- Thea von Harbou, who was director Fritz Lang's wife, and a collaborator in the creation of the film -- this is the novel that Harbou wrote from her...
