Margaret Atwood

THE HANDMAID’S TALE, 1985, 311 pp.
Set in late 20th century North America, where society decrees the only useful role for poor women is to produce children for the rich – at least, those women who are still capable of giving birth after the nuclear war and the AIDS epidemic have ravaged the population.
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Ray Bradbury

FAHRENHEIT 451, 1953, 190 pp.
A brave band of rebels fight the government in this society where firemen are those who burn the books the government bans.

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Anthony Burgess

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, 1962, 192 pp.
First-person narrator is Alex, a teenager struggling in a future society where violent crime is met with violent punishment. The novel is written in the language of Alex’s time, so it takes close attention on the part of the reader to follow the events

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Samuel Butler

EREWHON, 1872, 269 pp.
In the land of Erewhon, over the range, in the upside-down Antipodes, the morals of Victorian society are satirized.

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Philip K. Dick

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, 1968, 244 pp.
In the 21st century, it’s no longer possible to distinguish androids from humans, so androids are banished from the planet.

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Mark Dunn

ELLA MINNOW PEA, 2001, 205 pp.
Residents of a small island in South Carolina are forced to accommodate the dictates of their government. As letters fall off a sign honouring the town’s founder, the government bans use of those letters in either spoken or written language. Utopia is threatened as people struggle to communicate using an ever smaller pool of words.
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Pete Hautman

HOLE IN THE SKY, 2001, 288 pp.
In 2038, most of the world’s population has been wiped out by Flu. Four teenage survivors struggle to stay alive in the Grand Canyon, and to ward off attacks from a deviant group intent on spreading the virus.

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Robert A. Heinlein

FOR US THE LIVING, 2004, 288 pp.
After crashing his car in 1939, Perry Nelson awakens to find the radically different world of 2086, one marked by a United Europe, the destruction of Manhattan island by two helicopters in 2003, and other changes.

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James Hilton

LOST HORIZON, 1936, 211 pp.
An Englishman lost in India discovers the dream-like world Shangri-La where all is peaceful and life is eternal.

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Aldous Huxley

BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1932, 311 pp.
In the future the world is a paradise free of individual responsibility. Unfortunately, this also means the end of personal freedom, as Huxley contrasts this “paradise” with the disgusting “natural” world he knows.

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Lois Lowry

THE GIVER, 1993, 180 pp.
In an unnamed location, a society exists where everything is provided for people, and all live in harmony, each with his or her assigned role. 12-year-old Jonas, however, is given a role which forces him to look beneath the surface and see the darker aspects of this utopia, and to make a fatal choice.
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George Orwell

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, 1949, 267 pp.
This is the novel that introduced such terms as “Big Brother”, the “Thought Police,” and Newspeak to the English language. It describes a society which is totally governed by a State which seeks to control its citizens, right down to their thoughts, and which distorts the “truth” broadcast by the media it controls. The central character, Winston Smith, attempts to break free of government control.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

HERLAND, 1915, 147 pp.
Feminist utopia about a hidden kingdom of women, whose sole purpose is to create a better kind of human, unfettered by the demands and constraints imposed by men.

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Margaret Peterson Haddix

AMONG THE HIDDEN, 1998, 153 pp.
In the near future, shortages and famine have caused the government to take total control of people’s lives. The Population Police strictly enforce the limit of two children per family, so Mark, the third child, is forced to spend his life in hiding.

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Ayn Rand

ATLAS SHRUGGED, 1957, 1084 pp.
In the future, society has become complacent and socialist. A few capitalist heroes shake things up, and reawaken the desire for greatness in the common man.

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Starhawk

THE FIFTH SACRED THING, 1993, 486 pp.
A city of eco-feminist witches must stand up to the violence of an army bred on a repressive Christian ideology that justifies the greed of a corporate cabal of rich white men.

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H.G. Wells

THE TIME MACHINE, 1895, 115 pp.
A time traveler from Victorian England arrives in 802,701 A.D., and finds that future England is divided into two sharply different groups, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The traveler’s initial suspicion, that the Morlocks are repeating centuries-old patterns of servitude, is proved false when he discovers that the truth is much more horrifying.
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