Sunday, February 28, 2010

The 16 Best Dystopian Novels

Pop Crunch has a list of sixteen great dystopian novels. The list, I think, inappropriately incorporates post-apocalyptic fiction wholly into the genre. Still, it has some interesting suggestions for future reads. One that's missing is Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, a marvelous assertion of the dignity of the individual.

Well, I guess that could then be taken as not dystopian, but it definitely starts out as a classical dystopia.

What books on the list have you read? What would you add to it?


via Digg

5 comments:

Divers and Sundry said...

Anthem is missing because it's a list of "best" books. And Anthem was written by Rand. /snark

John said...

It's one of Rand's better novels because the medium did not require her to have dialogue and character-writing skills.

bob said...

I've read 1984,Farenheit 451,The Road, several others I've meant to read and never have gotten around to it.

Funny you mentioning Anthem the list made me think of Atlas Shrugged. What could be more dystopian than destroying the most productive members of society.

John said...

Alas Shrugs has been flying off the shelves in record numbers in the past year.

ClassicalLiberal said...

I just read "We" by EUGENE ZA~1IATIN

Certainly a good Dystopian Novel which had been a large inspiration for writers like Rand, Orwell, Huxley, and Wells. It was written in response to the author's personal experiences during the Russian revolution of 1905, the Russian revolution of 1917 and WW1

You never hear about this one. I just stumbled on it last week.

Check it out.

http://mises.org/books/we_zamiatin.pdf