Have read some of these books and you never quite forget Brave New World or 1984 because they creep you out. Crime and Punishment was another one that really should fit in somewhere. Brian has a good suggestion. After seeing the previews of the movie, "Clockwork Orange', I could never watch it. That was more frightening to me than any monster movie.

I am super late to this, but Neal Shusterman's "Unwind" is a YA story set in a fiction post-civil war America fought over abortion rights that was pretty awesome.

You missed The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. I read it in the 70's and could not find it for years, but it seems to be making a comeback. It is disturbing, and disturbingly possible.

One not mentioned yet has stuck in my mind midst years of dystopic/apocalyptic reading: Swan Song, author forgotten...

Omg. I LOVE UGLIES. City of Ember was okay.
Also I love The Host by Stephenie Meyer, and Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Good dystopian stories.

There's a LOT of dystopian stuff out recently - particularly YA: Westerfeld's Uglies and Jeanne du Prau's City of Ember among them.

I think someone already mentioned but I will second Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Bleak. Delicious.

Yeah, u-topia means literally no place, but it's an intentional pun on eu-topia meaning good place. So all together it means a place that is so good as to be completely unrealistic. It means a place that couldn't exist because it's so perfect.
Dystopia is therefore not a misnomer.

Jamie:

1984...I put it in my top 5 favorite books of all times. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Giver...another excellent book!

Hey, I'm extremely thrilled to see Zamyatin on this list!! (Sorry, my comment is not very constructive :( )

On your list, I've read:

-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-1984 by George Orwell
-Anthem by Ayn Rand
-We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

If I had to rate them in order of preference:
1. We 2. 1984 3. Animal Farm 4. Handmaid's Tale and finally 5. Anthem

Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World are on my TBR list.

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is another book that you might think about reading if you like distopias. It's distoperific :D

ETA: I've also read Blindness. I second (or are we up to thirds now?) the recommendation, it's very good as well, but the lack of quotation marks gets annoying after a while. My husband raves about Max Brook's World War Z.

The Handmaid's Tale is easily one of my all-time favorite books, and the ending leaves a lot for discussion. That is all I will say. Margaret Atwood is amazing, and in my opinion, this is her best.

..

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban!

Blindness and Never Let Me Go are both amazing. I loved the Martian Chronicles when I was younger, need to re-read. I was quite intrigued by the Wanting Seed (Burgess) when I read it for the first time a few years ago. It has some interesting ideas about how people would alter the preferred sexuality based on whether the population was too large or too small--so that when the world was overpopulated people were rewarded for being gay and straight guys were beaten up by gay equivalents of the British bobbies, but when there the population starts to shrink, suddenly being gay is perceived in much the same way it is today, in certain communities anyway.

Oh, my fave kinda book, though I tend to include books in which humans prevail and aren't crushed by the dystopia.

World War Z - Max Brooks
A Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmier
Cell - Stephen King
I am Legend - Richard Matheson
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Seeing - Jose Saramago
Jamestown - Matthew Sharpe
Children of Men - PD James

Don't know that I'd call Fatherland a dystopic novel - however, it is a really good read. Harris' grasp of WWII history is excellent so that his novel is quite believable!

The literal (and I believe original) meaning of "utopia" is "no place" - an imaginary, far away place; a place that does not exist. It's not necessarily positive OR negative, so "dystopia" is kind of a misnomer.

I see it as being akin to the word "luck". Most people say "wish me luck" when they mean "wish me GOOD luck", no?

It could be argued that only a cruel person would wish someone BAD luck, but then, this IS the "Books I Loathed" group, yes?

=')

-Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
-The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
-Blindness by Jose Saramago
-Seeing by Jose Saramago

All quite brilliant and poingant right now too. I was going to suggest Oryx and Crake too. A couple other I haven't read but have heard interesting reviews are Fatherland by Robert Harris; if Hitler won idea, (because who can't get enough of those?) Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson; another one claiming to have coined the term "cyber-punk". Did he? Didn't he? Who knows...
Happy reading, because tomorrow we are all controlled by something other than ourselves, or maybe we all ready are? hmmmm

This is such interesting thread, I have read several of the books here mentioned, and I'm sure many of the others will end up in my wish list.

The thing with this kind of books though is that for me are so taxing that I cannot read several in a row, I must read one, chew it over, move on to something lighter and then tackle another one. I fear if I don't take a break I'd become depressed ... I get that engrossed with books!

Some of my favorites that have been mentioned are 1984 and The Lord of the Flies, dying to read: animal farm and V for Vendetta.

My suggestion for the dystopia theme:
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood.

It was quite surreal when the book came out at exactly the same time as the whole "bird flu" scare was breaking. Talk about life imitating art...

I found a list online and I am going from that...

Read so Far:

1984 - Orwell
Animal Farm - Orwell
The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
Harrison Bergeron - Vonnegut
Anthem - Rand
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
Lord of the Flies - Golding
A Wrinkle in Time - L'Engle

Recommendations:
Did anyone mention "The Chrysalids" by John Wyndham? Read it in high school and I remember it being apocalyptic.
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro.

Thanks ladies, its much clearer now!

Apocalyptic would be a world that is very different after a huge disaster (usually one that kills off much of humanity).

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson? Or are you only doing fiction? It could be argued that some of the earlier environmental lit could be considered apocalyptic.

Dystopias and Utopias are usually written about places distant from current society (either in time or space). Utopias are where things are viewed positively - Dystopias are where things take a negative turn.

That's my take on it, anyway.

Perhaps someone else could tackle the apocalyptic stuff?

Hi, this is going to make me sound really uneducated, but could somebody please explain exactly what dystopic/utopic/apocolyptic literature is? I haven't read any of the books above, and I had a look on Wikipedia, but I still don't really understand! Thanks

I picked "Brave New World" and "1984" for the book club I hosted most recently. It was cool to read them back to back and compare them, especially since the copy I read of "Brave New World" had extra material including a letter from Huxley to Orwell pretty much saying, "Thanks for your copy of 1984, but I think the future will be more like Brave New World." My take on the two is that "Brave New World" is the better book. I also dug up my old copy of "Animal Farm" and watched the movie "Idiocracy," which is probably the most accurate version of the future out of all of them! :) "A Clockwork Orange" was pretty great, too!

So far, which do you think is the most likely future?

Limbo, Bernard Wolfe
Mysterium, Robert Charles Wilson
The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Not sure if I've got the theme perfectly nailed, but you might consider adding to your list these favorites of mine:

-Dhalgren, by Samuel Delany
-Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
-The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro
-The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
-Amnesia Moon, by Jonathan Lethem
-Neuromancer, by William Gibson
-The Dream Master, by Roger Zelazny
-Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Children of Men by P.D. James (much better than the movie)
England, England by Julian Barnes

In the apocalyptic-dystopic realm there's also Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness (there's even a lightsaber duel in that one!)

I once took a class on utopian literature in high school, but most of it was really dystopian. Your list is pretty much what we read.

nikki- it is totally depressing. I've been reading some books from my childhood to balance it out (found a bunch at a thrift shop!)...The BFG, Harriet the Spy, Indian in the Cupboard, etc. Its a weird combination.

Lori- My boyfriend recommended Island, it is on our bookshelf but its totally possible that he has nsver actually read it, ha ha. Maybe I'll save that for later down the line and give Fahrenheit 451 priority. I have heard that it takes a while to get into A Clockwork Orange because of the slang, we'll see how that goes. Sometimes I lose patience when I feel lost.

Oh, by the way, if you are going to also try Apocolyptic... you must read The Earth Abides!!! Great novel about one man who wakes to a world that appears empty, and how he travels around it trying to determine what happened and where, if any, the survivors are....

ok, from what youve listed -- here are the ones Ive read:

The Road - excellent novel. Very sparse and haunting. Loved it. One of my all time favorite novels.

Island by Huxley - Forced myself to finish it. I wanted to read Lost Lit, and this one sounded so intriquing. Basically, Huxlet wrote an essay on what he thought the perfect society was, and just created one dimensional characters to spew it out for us. great ideas in here, but an awful, torturous read.

1984 - read this becuase i thought i was missing out on a great thing. turns out i wasnt. Another novel i had to force myself to finish. just blah for me.

ClockWork Orange - i read this last year, in the summertime. Once you get used to the slang the characters speak in, and get into the swing of things, its a decent read. Horrible kids doing horrible things. But surely something I feel everyone must read at some time.

Fahrenheit 451 - Another summertime read for me. MUST BE READ BY EVERYONE. great futuristic novel about firemen who burn books, as they are illegal. I really liked this one. alot.

Themed reading can be fun, i tryed to do that with conspiracy lit (all books out there in the same vien as DaVinci Code) and also with Lost (the tv show) and all the novels that are connected with it. I only found a few ive loved, the rest have been awful. Just choose your titles wisely, Theres a little bit of gold, but alot of dirt mixed in with it....

Sounds depressing!
Seriously, I just finished The Road a few weeks ago and I was depressed for a few days after finishing it. I like what you're doing though. I've never thought of reading several books with the same theme....

Interesting idea.

Read so far:
-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-1984 by George Orwell
-The Giver by Lois Lowry
-Iron Heel by Jack London
-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

To Read:
-A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
-Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
-Utopia by Sir Thomas More
-Island by Aldous Huxley
-When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells
-Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
-Anthem by Ayn Rand
-We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I tend to like dystopias but I saw the movie, or I should say 3/4 of the movie A Clockwork Orange and it was the most horrible thing I ever experienced. I couldn't finish it. I wonder if the book is as horrible.

I have declared 2008 to be my year of dystopic literature (aloud, multiple times, and always in an ostentatious fashion). I'm excited to have actually set some sort of reading goal for myself--I've never actively put together a themed book list for myself. Anyway, to keep in line with the 'books I loathed' theme, here is my list for you guys to pick at. Loathe away, or sing them praises, or give me some suggestions...or all three!

I'm thinking of widening the theme to dystopic AND apocalyptic... but kind of only because I want to be able to include "The Road" (which I just read and adored).

Read so far:
-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-The Road (if I decide it counts)

Currently Reading:
-1984 by George Orwell

To Reread:
-The Giver by Lois Lowry
-V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

To Read:
-A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
-Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
-Utopia by Sir Thomas More
-Island by Aldous Huxley
-Iron Heel by Jack London
-When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells
-Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
-Anthem by Ayn Rand
-We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I'd love to hear your opinions!