15 Best Dystopian Novels, Ranked by How Much Already Exists

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is correcting old news so that the government has always been right. He starts a diary, which is illegal, then a love affair, which is worse. What everyone remembers is the telescreen watching him, but the part that has aged hardest is quieter: a state vocabulary designed so certain thoughts cannot be assembled, and a public record that can be updated overnight. Orwell wrote it while dying of tuberculosis in a cold house on the Scottish island of Jura, and you can feel the fever in the sentences.

In Huxley's future, humans are grown to order in hatcheries, sorted into castes before birth, and kept content by a drug called soma, casual sex without consequence, and entertainment that never asks anything of you. Nobody gets dragged away in the night. People simply have no reason left to want anything else. The plot follows a misfit who visits a reservation outside the system and brings back a young man raised on Shakespeare, which goes about as well as you would expect.

Montag burns books for a living, which in his city is an ordinary municipal job, like clearing drains. The state never had to force this on anybody. People stopped reading first, because reading is slow and demanding and the wall screens were right there, and the banning followed later as a formality. His wife spends her days with an earpiece in and a parlour of screens she calls her family. Bradbury wrote it fast, on a coin-operated typewriter in a library basement, and the speed shows in the best possible way.

Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend who stands in a store window studying human behaviour until a girl called Josie picks her. The book is told entirely in Klara's voice, which is polite, careful, and missing precisely the pieces you would expect a machine to miss. Around the edges of her narration you catch a society that has sorted its children by genetic enhancement and quietly left the rest behind. Ishiguro does what he always does, which is hand you a narrator who cannot see the shape of her own situation and let you see it for her.

Shalini's daughter disappears during a birthday party, on the day her mixed marriage stops being survivable. The city has been reorganised into sectors by community, each behind its own wall, with purity sold as an amenity and rubbish piling up in the gaps between. Shalini is sent to a facility for women like her, then released into the lower city to work, and her search continues the only way it can, slowly and mostly inside her own head. Akbar keeps the politics offstage and the mother in focus, which is why the book lands.

Mae lands a job at a campus-sized company that has merged everyone's accounts, payments and identity into a single login, and it is the best job she has ever had. There are smoothies, concerts, a doctor on site, and a gently escalating expectation that she share more of herself. The company slogans are the strongest thing in the book: three short lines about secrecy and sharing that unsettle you precisely because you can imagine a real founder saying them onstage to applause.

Offred had a job, a bank card, a husband and a daughter, and then the accounts of every woman in the country were frozen in a single afternoon and it went from there. Now she lives in a commander's house under a new regime, valued only for a working body, and the novel is her voice, careful and dry, telling you what her days are actually made of. What keeps it standing is that every piece of Gilead has a precedent somewhere in history, so none of it can be waved off as invention.

Lauren Olamina is fifteen, lives behind a wall her neighbourhood built itself, and keeps a journal because the adults around her still believe the old order is coming back. Water costs more than fuel, corporations are quietly restarting company towns, and fire travels faster than news. When the wall fails she walks north with strangers, setting down the beginnings of a belief system built on one line about change. Butler wrote this in the early nineties and set it in years we have already lived through, which is an unsettling thing to notice on page one.

Kathy narrates her childhood at Hailsham, a school in the English countryside with unusually good art lessons and a strange emphasis on health, then the friendships and jealousies that follow the three of them into their twenties. The premise arrives early and is not a twist, so I will keep it where Ishiguro keeps it: these children were raised for a purpose everyone understands and nobody discusses. The horror is never the system itself. It is how completely the characters have accepted it.

The novel opens with an actor dying onstage during King Lear on the night the outbreak reaches Toronto, then moves back and forth across the twenty years on either side of the collapse. The main thread follows a caravan of musicians and actors touring settlements around the Great Lakes, performing because a life of bare survival turned out not to be enough. This is the least frightening book on the list, and that is a design decision. Mandel is interested in what people carry, not in how they die.

D-503 is building a spaceship for the One State. He lives in a glass apartment where everyone can see everyone, eats on a schedule, and is issued sexual partners by coupon, with a curtain permitted for the hour. He begins his notebook as propaganda meant for the readers of other planets, which is why watching it deteriorate into something human is such a good trick. Zamyatin wrote it in Soviet Russia around 1920 and could not publish it there, so the book first reached readers in English translation in New York.

McCarthy never tells you what happened. There was a flash, then ash, then years of cold and nothing growing, and now a father and his son walk a road towards the coast with a pistol and two bullets. They scavenge, they hide from other people, and the father teaches the boy a story about carrying the fire, which is the only moral instruction left in the world. The sentences are stripped of most punctuation and nearly all adverbs, and the effect is a kind of grey hymn. It is the finest writing here and the hardest to finish.

Theo Faron is an Oxford historian and cousin to the man now running England as Warden, in a country where the last generation ever born has grown up spoilt and resented. James was a crime novelist, so she is superb on administrative texture: the state suicide ceremonies for the old, the prison island, the imported labour sent home once it ages, the women christening kittens. Then a small group of dissidents asks Theo for help and the novel turns into a chase across the countryside.

A strip of muscle wakes up across the collarbones of girls everywhere, and it can deliver anything from a static prick to a fatal shock. Alderman then does the genuinely interesting work, which is not the discovery but the ten years afterwards: the news cycles, the segregated schools, the safety advice issued to men, the new religions, the governments that flip. The whole thing is framed as a historical novel written thousands of years later by a male author, which is the joke the book is built to land.

Padmanabhan sets this in an unnamed country run by a General and his clones, where a policy of extermination has left no women at all, and a sixteen-year-old called Meiji has been raised inside a compound believing she is a boy. One uncle takes her on a journey across poisoned terrain towards a border, and the book is that journey plus the slow, awkward business of a girl working out what she actually is. It is strange, uneven, and unlike anything else I have read in Indian fiction.