Genres and forms
Dystopias and speculative fiction
Future worlds and imagined societies, from utopia to warning.
Utopia describes an island where everything is better, dystopia the same device reversed: a perfectly organised society in which the reader would not care to live. The genre begins with More in 1516 and becomes political in the twentieth century, when Zamyatin imagines a glass state where everyone has a number, Huxley a humanity conditioned by pleasure, Orwell an administration that rewrites the archives. Bradbury adds firemen whose task is to burn books. These stories speak less of the future than of the moment when they were written.
works 9
- EssayUtopiaThomas More · 1516A traveller tells an English lawyer what he saw on an island where money has no currency.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelErewhonSamuel Butler · 1872A country behind the mountains where thieves are treated and the sick are condemned.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThe War of the WorldsH. G. Wells · 1898Cylinders fall on the outskirts of London, and what emerges from them does not negotiate.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelWeМыYevgeny Zamyatin · 1924A novel of 1920-1921, long banned in the Soviet Union: the diary of an engineer in a future totalitarian state.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelBrave New WorldAldous Huxley · 1932A society that manufactures its citizens in bottles and makes them happy by prescription.Literature
- NovelWar with the NewtsVálka s mlokyKarel Čapek · 1935A satire of the Europe of the thirties, through a species that is discovered, exploited, and then goes to war with humans.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelAshes, AshesRavageRené Barjavel · 1943A civilization entirely dependent on electricity loses it in a single night, and what remains of it must leave the cities.Literature
- NovelNineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell · 1949A man whose job is to remake the past begins to keep a notebook.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelFahrenheit 451Ray Bradbury · 1953America in the early fifties is filling up with television sets. In this novel, the fire captain explains that censorship did not come from above.Literature