Utopias & Dystopias

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
For 12,000 years the Galactic Empire had ruled supreme. Now it is dying a slow death from entropy and corruption. Only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future – a dark age of ignorance, barbarism and warfare. So to preserve the accumulated wisdom of the ages and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy. But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Also try the rest of Asimov’s Foundation series.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the Wives. The tale is told by Offred, a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be. Also try Oryx and Crake.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is set in a grim alternate-future setting ruled by a tyrannical government in which firemen as we understand them no longer exist. Here, firemen don't douse fires, they ignite them. And they do this specifically in homes that house the most evil of evils: books. Books are illegal in Bradbury's world, but books are not what his fictional – yet extremely plausible – government fears: They fear the knowledge one pulls from books. Through the government's incessant preaching, the inhabitants of this place have come to loathe books and fear those who keep and attempt to read them. They see such people as eccentric, dangerous and threatening to the tranquility of their state. This book was also Wake County’s first “Wake Reads Together” selection in 2003.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Told by the central character, Alex, this brilliant, hilarious and disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology and authoritarianism. Anthony Burgess' 1963 classic stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a classic of 20th-century post-industrial alienation, often shocking us into a thoughtful exploration of the meaning of free will and the conflict between good and evil.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
The inspiration for the movie Bladerunner. By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae. But when these androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids and to retire them. But cornered androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
In Gibson's Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel the plot contains sex, drugs, black market body parts, virtual reality, electronic relationships, pleasure palaces, murder, mayhem, cloned assassins and intrigue in cyberspace, with nary a virtual nice guy in the mix. There's just enough time to take a deep breath between chapters, as the reader is bombarded with strong language, tumultuous violence and compelling imagery. Gibson's horrifying vision of our terrible headlong rush to nowhere is the original “cyberpunk” novel. Also try Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
A classic hard Science Fiction book about a society where citizenship must be earned through civil service, warfare is necessary for moral development, and abusing children makes them good citizens. In this futuristic military adventure, a recruit goes through the roughest boot camp in the universe and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry in what historians would come to call the First Interstellar War.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Huxley´s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World – a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class. In a world where there is no want or violence Bernard Max feels something is missing.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living and ignite the fires of change.

The Giver by Lois Lowry
In the "ideal" world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are "released" – to great celebration – at the proper time. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment – the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory – he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. Also try Gathering Blue and Messenger.

1984 by George Orwell
In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother Is Always Watching You and the Thought Police can literally read your mind, Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of every liberating human pursuit, from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion.

Woman On the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Onetime college girl, loving mother, pickpocket and unmarried, mourning wife Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been imprisoned in a New York mental hospital for assaulting a pimp and declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future and able to communicate with the year 2137. She hovers between a future of life dominant and an endless present of neuroelectric experimentation. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today.

Chasm City by Alistair Reynolds
When security specialist Tanner Mirabel loses a client, killed by an assassin named Argent Reivich, he sets off on a manhunt to bring Reivich to justice. His search leads him through the dark underside of the domed community of Chasm City, a once utopian city overrun by a vicious virus known as the Melding Plague. There he comes face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that everyone would do anything to keep hidden – the city's strange, mutated inhabitants, victims of a nanotechnological virus – and ultimately comes up against his own worst fears and inner demons.

Toward the End of Time by John Updike
Ben Turnbull, a retired investment counselor living north of Boston in the year 2020, in a country decimated by a U.S.-China war, chronicles his life in his journals over the course of a year, finding his personal history merging into alternative identities throughout history and the future. As Turnbull gets caught up in the "many-universes" theory resulting from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, he finds his identity racing back and forth in time.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's first novel, an unforgiving portrait of an automated and totalitarian future depicts a world where social and geographical lines separate the community between the educated, who run and build the machines, and the uneducated, who perform the manual tasks that the machines cannot. A human revolt against the machines, which control life, was arranged by the machines themselves to prove the futility of such resistance. Visionary and unrelenting, this is felt by some critics to be Vonnegut's best and most original novel.