Aug 08, 2024
Anyone got any lesser known but good dystopian fiction books?
Pretty famous but sometimes missing from lists of great dystopias: - Riddley Walker - Ballard's early global disaster novels, esp. The Drowned World and The Crystal World Proto-dystopia: "After London, or Wild England" by Richard Jeffries - I actually don't rate this at all, but it's super interesting as one of the earliest dystopias. Excellent Brazilian dystopias: "Zero" and "And Still the Earth" by Ignacio de Loyola Brandão. Can't recommend these highly enough. Graphic dystopia: "Soft City" by Hariton Pushwagner. Very underrated psychological dystopia, hardly anyone has read this one, "The Quarantined City" by James Everington. Other recent dystopias I liked: "Amatka" by Karin Tidbeck, "Nod" by Adrian Barnes, "Under the Harrow" by Mark Dunn, "The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus (experimental dystopia), "Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World" by Donald Antrim (suburban dystopia), "Day of the Oprichnik" by Vladimir Sorokin, "The Smoke" by Simon Ings, "The Employees" by Olga Ravn. Older classic lesser-known dystopias: "The Death of Grass" ("No Blade of Grass" in USA) by John Christopher (eco-dystopia), "The Alteration" by Kingsley Amis (satirical dystopia), "Mockingbird" by Tevis (not really my jam but I can see why it's a classic), "A Minor Apocalypse" by Tadeusz Konwicki (Eastern Bloc semi-realistic dystopia), "The Committee" by Sonallah Ibrahim (fantastic Karkaesque Egyptian dystopia). And a science fiction book, "Dark Eden" by Chris Beckett, about life on a rogue planet.
Holy cow! You know your dystopian fiction. I feel like it's gonna take me a week to put all of these on my lists, let alone start them! Starting down with the first ones though, those all seem to be compelling adventure narrative it sounds like. 'The Crystal World' especially is a type of world I've never encountered in fiction before, and that sort of intrigues me a little bit of where they go with! Thanks for all those recs!!
cluelessinseattle1 year ago
Nabokov is hardly obscure but I've met surprisingly few people that have read Bend Sinister
Well I'm one of them!! I've got some other Nabakov on my lists, but hadn't added this one until just now. Thanks for the rec!
These are probably known to scifi readers (mostly cyberpunk), but lesser known outside of that: Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants. Sterling's Schismatrix Plus. Cadigan's Synners. PKD's The Penultimate Truth. If you are into comics/graphic novels/manga, then these are good: Ellis and Robertson's Transmetropolitan series. Bilal’s The Nikopol Trilogy. Frank Miller's Ronin. Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita.
I've never really dove into Sci Fi that much in the past but times have changed and sometimes I've found you can glean some often prescient info from them, so I'd probably look to turn over that new leaf. The first two you listed there sound like fun adventure space novels. It reminds me of watching The Fifth Element a ways back-- storytelling kinda like that. The Penultimate Truth hits close to home based on what I gathered from the synopsis and I think that might be a winner for the next Sci Fi book I read. I've never read manga before, but I'm not it against it either. Thank you for all of these recs!
hardyonthesulaco1 year ago
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It's the book that inspired Orwell's 1984.
Now that's interesting. And here I was thinking Orwell completely constructed the novel on his own-- that's how the literary circles and literary media seems to market it. Thanks for the recommendation. I'll add.
Native tongue the first book is pretty good although ive heard the third and final one is garbage (haven’t read it) its about female linguists who invent their own language. I didnt finish the first one because i borrowed it from the library and they asked for it back but ive read like 3/4’s of it and its pretty damn good
Thank you for the book recommend! This is outside of my general preference for reading so I don't know that I'd have it as a priority, but that's an interesting twist that they there are aliens and the women create their own language.