Dystopias

Dystopias, according to Webster's, are "imaginary places where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." In other words, they are the anti-utopias. The 2003 Books on the Bayou selection is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which takes place in a dystopia. We have put together a selection of other books set in dystopias for your further reading pleasure. Books with an * are especially suitable for young adults.

	Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale Set in the Republic of Gilead, during the late twentieth century, when declining birth rates caused by the effects of nuclear fallout and the AIDS epidemic result in a new social structure. All young women, who can bear healthy children, are allocated to powerfull regime men. This is the story of one of these young women.
	Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a short novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch".
	Bruce Brooks. No Kidding * In his twenty-first century society, fourteen-year-old Sam is allowed to decide the fate of his family after his mother is released from an alcohol rehabilitation center.
	Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not previously published in this country, with a new introduction by the author. This disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism.
	J.M. Coetzee. Waiting for the Barbarians The Magistrate, the novel's narrator, is a loyal servant of the Empire and runs the affairs of the frontier settlement. When the military arrives with barbarians from the uncharted deserts he witnessess cruelty and unjustice which brings him to rebel.
	Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Rick Deckard hunts androids who are hiding among humans living in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
	Mark Dunn. Ella Minnow Pea The residents of the island of Nollop have erected a monument in honor of the late inventor (and fellow islander) of The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog. The islanders pride themselves on their love of language. When the letter Z falls off the statue, the islanders see this as a message from beyond the grave and a tragedy. Then more letters begin to fall off...
	Margaret Peterson Haddix. Among the Hidden* In a future where the Population Police enforce the law limiting a family to only two children, Luke has lived all his twelve years in isolation and fear on his family's farm, until another "third" convinces him that the government is wrong.
	Pete Hautman. Hole in the Sky* In a future world ravaged by a mutant virus, sixteen-year-old Ceej and three other teenagers seek to save the Grand Canyon from being flooded, while trying to avoid capture by a band of renegade Survivors.
	Aldous Huxley. Brave New World A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present-- considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.
	Ursula K. Le Guin. Always Coming Home* A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.
	Lois Lowry. Gathering Blue* Lame and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed from her squalid village to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.
	Lois Lowry. The Giver* Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.
	Gregory Maguire. I Feel Like the Morning Star* Three teenagers in a post-holocaust survival colony find that their shelter has become a prison and decide to break out.
	Robert C. O'Brien. Z for Zachariah* Seemingly the only person left alive after a nuclear war, a sixteen-year-old girl is relieved to see a man arrive into her valley until she realizes that he is a tyrant and she must somehow escape.
	George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four To Winston Smith, a young man who works in the Ministry of Truth (Minitru for short), come two people who transform his life completely. One is Julia, whom he meets after she hands him a slip reading, "I love you." The other is O'Brien, who tells him, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." The way in which Winston is betrayed by the one and, against his own desires and instincts, ultimately betrays the other, makes a story of mounting drama and suspense.
	Marge Piercy. Woman on the Edge of Time Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today....
	Richard Powers. Plowing the Dark On the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers is building an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage in another empty white room. These two remote places will be linked by the power of the imagination.
	Philip Roth. The Human Stain Set in 1998, when ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciations and rituals of purification, the newest novel by award-winning author Philip Roth concludes his eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives begun in American Pastoral and continued in I Married a Communist.
	Caroline Stevermer. River Rats* Nearly twenty years after the holocaust called the Flash has destroyed modern civilization, Tomcat and a group of other orphans face danger as they steer an old steamboat over the toxic waters of the Mississippi River.
	Will Weaver. Memory Boy* Sixteen-year-old Miles and his family must flee their Minneapolis home and begin a new life in the wilderness after a chain of cataclysmic volcanic explosions creates dangerous conditions in their city.