Heise cites Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man (1805) as the first end-of-the-world scenario. That said, we’ve done our best to also put the spotlight on works from throughout literary history and pay homage to the early influencers. We skew toward the recent, as the term wasn’t even invented until the 19th century and has only in the last half-century or so come into vogue. There are some familiar faces, but we also wanted to pluck from unexpected corners: You’ll find literary fiction, young-adult works, graphic novels, realist tomes, some books written long ago, and others published in just the last few years. Heise, professors of English at Cornell and UCLA, respectively, both of whom study dystopian literature, and limited our selections to books with some connection to Earth. It’s in this spirit that we assembled a group of readers to put together a list of some of the greatest works of dystopian literature, as part of Vulture’s Dark Futures week.
They don’t just appear in the sci-fi section, either - dystopian fiction is firmly ensconced in book-club-ready literary circles, as well. You’ll find the classics - your Orwells, Huxleys, and Atwoods - but you’ll also find a rising crop of new entries into the dystopian canon, from younger authors with fresher concerns about what, precisely, could spell our doom. At every turn in a bookstore aisle, you’re increasingly likely to stumble across a vision of our world, through the looking glass.
We may or may not be living in a dystopian age, but we are certainly living in an age of dystopias.
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