A semi-autobiographical novel that attacks Victorian era hypocrisy as it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published, it was accepted...
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...
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...
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)....
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 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 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',...
The story of a billionaire, Isaac Flint, who attempts to control the very air people breathe, and the violent consequences of his ambition and greed. In the concluding chapter, Flint is described as one of "the...
Set in Boston on December 26, 2000, but written before the turn of the nineteenth century, this classic Utopian novel is more significant and relevant than ever with its reappearance this millennium. Addressing...
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...
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...
One of the first dystopian science fantasies, this novel features a grey dust from an ancient glass vial which is capped with a silver figure of Cerberus, the 3-headed mythological dog that guarded the gate...
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 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...
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,...
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, William Guest,...
Written by a mysterious 19th-century Scottish golfer named J. (or Jay) McCullough, using the pseudonym "J.A.C.K.," it also predicted the advent of golf carts, golf professionals and international golf competitions....
The book begins with Charon, ferryman of the Styx startled--and annoyed--by the arrival of a house boat on his mystical river. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that...
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