Looking for Dystopian books (more details below)

So I've been on a dystopian book searching spree, and can you recomend me any that I should read. I kind of want the books to be older (before 1990's) and I perferrably want it do with something with human nature, but doesn't have to be. Any ideas? I will greatly appreciate this.

Strange Tomorrow by Jean Karl. A YA, and a good one.

Earth Abides by George Stewart is an older one, but very good. Post-apocalyptic look at what would happen to society.

Alas, Babylon or, a new one that includes both old an new stories is John Joseph Adams' new anthology called Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories. I just finished it and it's fantastic. (Sorry, but touchstones still aren't working for this title)

I suppose you already read the "prime suspects" ?
Brave New World
This Perfect Day
1984
Farenheit 451 ?

And books by John Wyndham

I've heard The Postman is terrific, but haven't read it.

Wyndham's The Chrysalids is excellent, that one I have read.

Years ago I read On the Beach by Nevil Shute, but have no memory of it at all. It's often referred to as a classic in this genre.

The Postman
Dies the Fire
The Road
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Not older, but Cormac McCarthy's The Road fits the bill. As does The Passage. The Half-Made World is dystopean on a world very like our Old West.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

>8 DaynaRT:,9 The Road isn't dystopian, there's no utopia gone sour, or any kind of society still standing totalitarian or not, just post-apocalyptic survival

To add to my previous suggestions The dispossessed.
The left hand of darkness also has a dystopian society in part of the book, but more as a background than as a main feature.

I second On the Beach. Sad, exquisitely written, lingers in the memory.

ETA: probably more post-apocalypse than distopian.

>11 Jarandel:
I'll recommend it anyways.

#13 - As would I. I think it fits the bill well enough. There are groups of people still living together in The Road. And at least some of those groups show some remnants of a social order, as BLEEPed up as it is.

Probably too new, but Shades of Grey is pretty good.

I think you could count Lord of the Flies. We're reading it for book group in April. It certainly has a message about human nature, and would be OK for YA.

Wow, that’s a lot of suggestions. That’s good. Let me look at some of these…

I have read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but not Brave New World or This Perfect Day. Brave New World looks very unusual and This Perfect Day sounds like a bad name for a dystopian society, but the world pretty much being controlled by a machine? Creepy.

On the Beach looks pretty good. It does look post-apocalyptic book, but I list all the dystopian books as Apocalyptic. What will happen after a nuclear explosion? Hmm… Definitely something I would read. The Postman looks intriguing, but just by looking at the reviews on LibraryThing, it doesn’t seem like I will like it. The Chrysalids seems to be about mutants after being exposed to nuclear radiation. Awesome.

Strange Tomorrow is something I’m going to have to look into. There are no reviews on LibraryThing or descriptions, so I have to look at other places.

I might have to read Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories. In a lot of short story books, it’s either a hit or a miss with me, but most of the time it’s a hit, so if I can get my hands on that book, I might have to read it.
Dies the Fire seems to be the opposite of what most dystopias I’ve seen are. It’s the total failure of all technology. I can see the problems with that. Very intriguing.
Shades of Grey also looks too good to pass up too.

I hear of Lord of the Flies, but never knew what it was about. The part I like about it, and I don’t know if it is true or someone’s opinion, but he said: “Where 1984 is scary as it is what we could become, this is scary because it is what we are. It shows the human boys as beasts and stresses that this nature is contained within us all just waiting for the right circumstances to come out.” I kind of agree with that.

Thanks for all of these suggestions. I will look over them again to see which ones I really want to read. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to list them.

I think Lord of the Flies is a classic that you will be glad you've read. Often in other discussions someone will refer to it and you'll be glad to know what they are talking about. That is also true of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. Those are all written a while ago.

I think you are also looking for works that are more recently written. The Road is certainly one book one hears talked about frequently.

I will be very interested to hear which ones you decide to read.

You know, I've been reading a considerably amount of "old" books since last summer than I ever did. Don't know why, well yes I do. It may have to do with my book class, and also new intrests. I looked at The Road, but didn't seem too interesting. I am confident too that Lord of the Flies will be good, and I do know a place I can get my hands on it. That's my next problem, getting the books.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

The Road I believe will wind up a classic alongside the other great classics listed here, all definitely worth reading. I compulsively read it in about 2 days. If you're not hooked after about 10 pages, then it might not be your thing.

I also recently picked up I Who Have Never Known Men, which looks interesting.

Starhawk wrote The Fifth Sacred Thing and Marge Piercy wrote Woman on the Edge of Time; both juxtapose utopian and dystopian societies. Another in that vein might be Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, although it's trying to do something quite different.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy -- The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge -- has a similar compare-the-possibilities approach.

Another Piercy that's often overlooked in SF circles is Dance the Eagle to Sleep, which is a sort of dystopian view of the generation gap / conflict of the early 1970s.

Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country is a pretty bleak vision no matter how you look at it. Her Beauty is similarly dark.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's False Dawn is a 1978 dystopia that reminds me of McCarthy's The Road in its bleakness. See also Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World.

#17 - I do recommend you try "Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories" DESPITE it being short stories. I usually shy away from them myself because they are so hit and miss and sometimes they are mostly "miss", which can be a terrible disappointment. But in this case, I had read Adam's Wastelands: Stories of The Apocalypse and was so impressed that I tried this new one. I was sold the moment I saw his first choice, considered to be what he calls THE classic dystopian story, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. This particular collection dates all the way back to 1948 going forward so it certainly qualifies as pre-nineties.

If you do decide to read it let me know what you think.

The Hunger Games trilogy and the Chaos Walking trilogy are compelling YA dystopian stories that a lot of adults are enjoying.

Not older (before the 90s) but instead quite recent, but they seemed worth mentioning.

>20 suitable1: Creepy. It reminds me of that one movie. What was it called? Was it called The Happening? But I didn’t like that movie. I think a bunch of eco-freaks made it. But this sounds…the same, but I would give it a try.

>21 tottman: The only review of that in LibraryThing is in a language I can’t read, so I’ll have to look up that book somewhere else. The title sounds intriguing though.

>22 lquilter: That’s a lot of suggestions. I’ll look them over when I have more time.

>23 SpongeBobFishpants: I’ve hear of Shirley Jackson. In high school, my class read a short story by her called The Possibility of Evil. It was good for a short story. Might have to check it out. And Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse is a Stephen King book. I haven’t read anything by him, but I want to. Just don’t know where to start.

>24 jnwelch: I've read The Hunger Games. I pride myself with being one of the first ones to read it ever. I've heard of the Chaos Walking series, but never knew what it was about. I might have to look into that.

I'm reading through the Brave New Worlds short story collection now. I've found a couple of new authors that I'm going to be keeping my eye out for from it. I've enjoyed reading The Lottery, SL Gilbow's Red Card, LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, Amaryllis by Carrie Vaughn, O Happy Day! by Geoff Ryman and others. I haven't got to Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card and the like yet, and I've read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron before (and seen the movie).
There's a bit of a bias towards the "overpopulation dystopia", but they're quite topical.

As far as I'm concerned, *the* classic dystopia is Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. It's the one everyone else used as a template.

Though they're new, I also recommend Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, which are a different and original kind of dystopia. If you haven't seen the movie Equilibrium yet, do watch it - it's a mish-mash of every dystopia you've ever seen. It's not particularly original, but it's well executed.

Taking the steampunk dystopias, I recommend Worldshaker by Richard Harland and Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Both have dystopic leanings, though they fit other styles as well. They're also new, but being steampunk means they also lean towards old.

In very vintage terms, make sure you've read The Time Machine by Wells as well - it's early dystopia in its own way.

>26 Choreocrat: We……….Sounds really good. I also heard of Uglies, but that’s not my type of books. No way. I don’t know much about Steampunk. It’s like science fiction in the “Victorian” age. I have no idea what the Victorian age is and why there is so much science fiction in that age. It’s a kind of specific genre, right? Also The Time Machine seems to be like another good book. Weird…just the way I like it.

The Victorian Age gets its name from Queen Victoria, and refers to the somewhat over-heated over-decorated social climate corresponding to her very long reign. Roughly the last third (maybe half) of the 19th century.

Why Victorian science fiction? Not sure. Something about the juxtaposition of the sleek modern science and the florid, brass, curliqued, overly formal Victorian environs seems to be fascinating.

I blame it all on the TV show "Wild Wild West," myself.

#25 - For some reason, both LT and other websites list Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse as being authored by Stephen King when it's not. It's an anthology of short stories by many authors, one of them being SK, but they were gathered and put together by editor John Joseph Adams. Unfortunately I'm not savvy enough to know how to fix it on LT. If memory serves they have the same error on Amazon.

That explains some stuff on Steampunk. I still think it's wierd subgenre.

That's kind of weird on the Wasteland short stories. I wonder who messed it up first. Probably Amazon since LibraryThing is connected to Amazon.

I also forgot. I got two books from the library today: Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World. I also wanted Shades of Grey, but I couldn't find it.

those are good ones. enjoy.

Oh yes, steampunk is definitely a subgenre, and often one that combines with another one - horror, sci-fi, low fantasy (often with vampires/werewolves and occasionally heavily rule-governed magic), mystery, mad science, romance, etc.

...and then, humor.

I see. Well leviathan by Scott Westerfeld is on my wishlist (actually techniquely it isn't, but it should be), and that's steampunk. I guess the only way to figure out what exactly Steampunk is, is to read a Steampunk book.

I hope you enjoy Leviathan. It's totally worth reading.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Severn&tag=Dystopia

Not sure if anyone mentioned Parable of the Sower/Talents yet...

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, a powerful post-apocalyptic dystopia, though not an easy read.

37 - I should have - I got a lot out of reading those books. I still can't say I *enjoyed* them, though. They're very tough.

Will - Yeah, they're pretty damned dark and powerful.