It occurs to me that the line gets pretty blurry sometimes between what is "dystopian" and what is "post-apocalyptic".

Rob, good point. I thought about offering "World War Z" to the list, but really it isn't a dystopian story, since (at least in my mind and per the list description) it is more about the rising up from near total disaster than the steady downward and hopeless spiral.

Some folks here don't seem to know the difference between UTOPIA and DYSTOPIA -- Lost Horizon, Utopia clearly belong to the former category (though THE DISPOSSESSED which I'm adding could plausibly be consider both/either).

Interesting comments... hmmmm.

Jeremy has ALMOST included every dystopian project of note but there are a few he left out. THE LAST MAN OUT OF EUROPE, for example, by Roger Cottrell, reinterprets Orwell's 1984 as a noir thriller and is a great read - it also contextualises a lot of Orwell's politics. His graphic novel, WAR CHILD, set in the corporate controlled Baghdad of 2048 will be worth looking out for when completed. While V FOR VENDETTA is John Moore's best dystopian graphic novel you should have included THE WATCHMAN, also some of the JUDGE DREDD stuff and THE GUVNOR series in 2000AD. Basically, we're living in a dystopia at the moment so the next few years should yield a rich crop if the working class aren't all ideologically integrated into their own enslavement through celebrity culture and reality TV!

GREAT list. I see several that I need to read!!

I'm surprised that no one added Y The Last Man Vol. 1 Unmanned. It straddles post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. And technically, something must be either dystopian or utopian, not both, as they are the exact opposite of eachother, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Great list everyone, many I would love to get my hands on!

Surprised that Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit doesn't appear on the list, a dystopian novel if ever there was, and a good one to boot.

Rob wrote: "It occurs to me that the line gets pretty blurry sometimes between what is "dystopian" and what is "post-apocalyptic"."

I think there's plenty of crossover, where a book can be classified as both, but the biggest distinguishing factor is the society in the dystopia, and the conflict between the character and that society.

There are a lot of post-apocalyptic novels that either don't have a society featured at all, (The Road is a good example of that, and there are also plenty that don't have any conflict between the character and the society - the survivor is creating the society (Earth Abides), or on a long journey to re/discover knowledge or a coming of age(The Wild Shore Three Californias), or it shows the conflicts between different survivor groups (The Postman.)

And while many dystopias are post-apocalyptic, that is not a requirement. Books with a gradual eroding of personal rights, or a gradual famine/resource shortage, or where corporations run the world, etc. are all examples where you could have a dystopia without the sudden catastrophe of an apocalypse.

I think that the rule of thumb is that a dystopian novel generally extrapolates from existing social and political trends while post apocalyptic novels (of which THE ROAD is one of the best) deal with the consequences of society's collapse. The latter is by nature more speculative. Orwell's 1984, as an example, developed trends that Orwell saw in wartime and post-war politics (given his Schachmanite view that Stalinism and fascism were essentially the same) combined with a pessimism (that later proved accurate) that Labour would fail to deliver the democratic socialist goods. In the end, we live in a different kind of dystopia where the anarchy of untrammelled free market capitalism retains the formal trappings of democracy but where real democracy is eroded and overshadowed by the coercive state. An example of a novel that is both dystopian and post apocalyptic would be John Wyndham's THE CHRYSALIDS which has post holocaust society reverting to feudalism but deals with contemporary issues like religious fundamentalism and racism as well.