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

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).

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!

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.

A third of the books on this list are not anthologies at all. The books by Dick (ironically, the #1 spot), Gibson, Kiernan and others are single-author collections, and should be on a list of their own.

David wrote: "A third of the books on this list are not anthologies at all [...but instead are...:] single-author collections, and should be on a list of their own."

Though technically correct, I would think that for most people the distinction is a blurry one. In the spirit of sharing favorites though, I'd say that these collections have a home here.

Does Choke really fit in this list?

Emily wrote: "Does Choke really fit in this list?"

You're right, I deleted it.

In order to be dystopian, doesn't a book have to set up a Utopia (i.e. an attempted perfect society) and then explore why the society is not, in fact, perfect but actually terrifying?

Oh, and as for the difference between utopia and dystopia, there isn't one as far as I'm concerned because we can't have a perfect society. There will always be somebody who feels trapped or confined or just repulsed by any utopia, and then it is no longer utopia for them. (Which is part of the reason "Lost Horizon" is so good, just think about that poor girl/woman/really old woman who fled.)

Chanel wrote: "In order to be dystopian, doesn't a book have to set up a Utopia (i.e. an attempted perfect society) and then explore why the society is not, in fact, perfect but actually terrifying?

"

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

WELL, 1984 is not a dystopia , strictly speaking: IT'S A DYSCHRONIA....Eastasia is no better or worse than Oceania, the whole world has evolved into a miserable society, a blend of those bastard children of the Enlightenment: Totalitarian Communism and Fascism. But I'd agree, we don't need to make such distinctions here....Everyone should have a list of 100 Nasties, be they historical periods, off-planet colonies, societies run by aliens, or flying pigs or whatever. Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine was once a demi-paradise, now it's the Barbary Coast.

See Richard D. Erlich's Wikepedia creation: Clockworks 2 for recent dystopian titles. (Rich soldiers on, I'm retired and reading Henning Mankell).

And BTW, how about the Christian heaven as a dystopia, where we get to sit on folding chairs and stare at a bright light for all eternity---or that's what it sounded like to me as a kid, maybe my Sunday school teacher was subversive.

This has been mentioned before but, after looking the list over, I think some people need to look up dystopia.

Watership down... a dystopia??

YES!!!!!! The Horror of bunnies staggering through a world, rebuilt after the great lettuce famine and ruled by evil Jack rabbits who treat the bunnies as little more than...animals!

Oh the horror, the horror...!

...Catch-22 was not Dystopia either. One of my favorite books ever, but no.

Mike (the Paladin) wrote: "This has been mentioned before but, after looking the list over, I think some people need to look up dystopia."

OK, looking it up!

A dystopia (from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, "bad, ill", and Ancient Greek: τόπος, "place, landscape"; alternatively cacotopia,[1] or anti-utopia) is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dystopian societies feature different kinds of repressive social control systems, various forms of active and passive coercion. Ideas and works about dystopian societies often explore the concept of humans abusing technology and humans individually and collectively coping, or not being able to properly cope with technology that has progressed far more rapidly than humanity has been able to evolve. Dystopian societies are often imagined as police states, with unlimited power over the citizens.

Yeah, Catch-22 is satire. Absolutely none of that definition fits what Catch-22 is.

Suggest maybe wording opening to pre-apocalyptic. Allthough, in some instances, if it is far enough after an apox that a large enough society has been rebuilt, maybe it should be included. Small scale societaly issues should still be considered apocalyptic. In The Road, there is not a large enough society to be anything. Books like Watership Down and Animal Farm are tricky to include in a list like this, while not directly in the genre, I understand why some might still consider them. May be fair to include them as quick reference to cross-over work that may be enjoyed.