Subject: Dystopian Fiction
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Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Res…Read More »
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Animal Farm George Orwell
The most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories, Animal Farm is the account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. Orwell is one of the very few mo…Read More »
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Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
It is 1984. The world is in a state of perpetual war and Big Brother sees and controls all. Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party and propaganda-writer at the Ministry of Truth, is keeping a journal he should not be keeping and falling in love with Julia, a woman he should not be seeing. Outwardly compliant, Wi…Read More »
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The Sleeper Awakes H. G. Wells
A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to disco…Read More »
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The Trial Franz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis–an event that proves maddening, as noth…Read More »
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Anthem Ayn Rand
In Anthem, Rand examines a frightening future in which individuals have no name, no independence, and no values. Equality 7-2521 lives in the dark ages of the future where all decisions are made by committee, all people live in collectives, and all traces of individualism have been wiped out. Despite such a restrict…Read More »
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When the Sleeper Wakes H. G. Wells
The Sleeper is just an ordinary man, no one special, just someone going about his everyday business. Until one day he awakes, and finds that the world around him has changed. No longer a nobody, he has been catapulted into the unenviable position of a pawn in a dangerous conspiracy where the stakes are high and the …Read More »
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The Iron Heel Jack London
Jack London's dystopian novel about the rise of oligarchic tyranny in the United States. Playing upon the socialistic themes that were so prevalent at the beginning of the 20th century, The Iron Heel tells the story of a wealthy class that squeezes out the middle class and effectively rules for three centuries unt…Read More »
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The Time Machine H. G. Wells
Wells touches gently on time travel as a notion, but mostly The Time Machine is about the terminal future he sees for mankind: His nameless time traveler ventures to the world that will be 802,701 A.D., And there he finds mankind divided among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are a gentle, winsome, idle race, who…Read More »
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The First Men In The Moon H. G. Wells
When penniless businessman Mr. Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr. Cavor, an absentminded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford that the invention makes possible …Read More »