From Wikipedia's entry on Utopian and Dystopian Fiction:
(links are from Wikipedia, I did not check them)
The word utopia was first used in this context by Thomas More in his Latin work Utopia, which literally means both "no place" and "best place" in Greek. In this work, More sets out a vision of an ideal society. An earlier example of a Utopian-like work from classical times is Plato's The Republic (Plato), in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system.Other examples include Aldous Huxley's Island, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Gulliver's Travels may also be seen as a satirical utopia because it is actually a comment on the society the author lived in. The same goes for Erewhon by Samuel Butler - where "Erehwon" is "nowhere" spelled in reverse.
[Dystopias:]Ursula K. Leguin's Always Coming Home fulfils this model, as does Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. In Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing there is no time-travelling observer, but her ideal society is invaded by a neighbouring power embodying evil repression. In Aldous Huxley's Island, in many ways a counterpoint to his better-known Brave New World, the fusion of the best parts of Buddhist philosophy and Western technology is threatened by the "invasion" of oil companies.
- Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things
- Stephen King's The Running Man
- Fritz Lang's film Metropolis
- Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
- John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.
- James De Mille's early A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
- Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited
- Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
- Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Player Piano
- Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake
- Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
- Ira Levin's This Perfect Day
- Ayn Rand's Anthem
- William Gibson's cyberpunk novels.
- Alfonso Cuarón's film Children of Men
- William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson's book Logan's Run
In another literary model, the imagined society journeys between elements of utopia and dystopia over the course of the novel or film. At the beginning of The Giver by Lois Lowry, the world is described as a utopia, but as the book progresses, dystopia takes over.
Then there is a Wikipedia entry on just Dytopia literature (not sure how this merits another entry, but oh wel. This one is just a long list of novels.
Here is an Amazon listmania list on both utopias and dystopias. And another.
Lots to choose from!
See? Androids!! *grin*
ReplyDeleteCheck out Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang, too. It's one of my all-time favorites.
i want to do this. it scares me a little, but i still want to.
ReplyDeleteHi Lisa,
ReplyDeleteCould you pop over to my blog and get my email address (added to the end of "Pay It Forward" post), and email your postal address to me?
Thanks,
j xxx
Soooo interesting to think about all these books together and in this context. So well done, my friend! Thanks. :)
ReplyDeleteI'd like to recommend
ReplyDeleteHouse of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer