Dystopic Novels?

paulumz asks: "I'm having a great deal of difficulty finding novels about distopias. Or any novels with a good depressing ending with no hope of a future. I'm well aware of 1984, Brave New World, and Handmaid's Tale, I'm looking for lesser known ones. Know of any good ones?"

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[Snafoo]

A quasi-dystopia (and very, very good reading):

_Infinite_Jest_, by David Foster Wallace.

In all seriousness . . .

[Mordant]

_I Am Legend_, Richard Matheson

_Jude the Obscure_, Thomas Hardy

_The Man Who Folded Himself_, David Gerrold

_I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream_, Harlan Ellison

_A Canticle for Leibowitz_, Walter E. Miller, Jr.

_Beowulf's Children_, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

_Kaledioscope Century_, John Barnes

The War Against the Chtorr books, David Gerrold

_On the Beach_, Nevil Shute

_Alas, Babylon_, Pat Frank

The Chung Ko Cycle, David Wingrove

The Maurid Audran trilogy, George Alec Effinger

We

[byoon]

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin [amazon.com] - considered the first real dystopian novel of the 20th century.

Nabokov

[esme]

Other people have mentioned a lot these authors, but here are my favorites:

• Zamiatin: We - probably the first dystopic novel
• Kakfa: The Trial - Much better then Metamorphosis, IMHO. Though the end is a bit sudden.
• Nabokov: Bend Sinister - the best dystopia, and the most realistic. Almost all early Nabokov has dystopic elements. Invitation to a Beheading is another great dystopia by VN, too.
• Wells: Time Machine - one of the great classics.
• Vonnegut: Galapagos - Vonnegut's got a lot of dystopic themes running through his work, but this is my favorite. Close runners up would be Slaughterhouse-5 and Cat's Cradle.
• Heller: Catch-22 - another looks at WW2 as a dystopia. Worth reading just for the concepts of jamais-vu and presque-vu. One of the funniest books around, too.

-Esme

Re:off the top of my head

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, pretty much anything by Philip K. Dick would qualify as dystopian, even those set in the "real world." However, "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" and "The Man in the High Castle" are the choicest of his novels, quality-wise.

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[1015]

back to the oldskool:

strindberg: inferno (strindberg is considered to have been clinically mad)

louis-ferdinand celine: Journey to the End of the (quote from review: Journey to the End of the Night is a novel of savage, exultant misanthropy, full of cynical humour and of the blackest pessimism in respect of humanity.)

bret easton ellis: american psycho (nuff said)

I know this book has been mentioned before

[Treeluvinhippy]

However "We" probably has the most depressing ending I have ever read. IMHO I would rather do the starving rat in a cage straped to your face thing from "1984" then what D-503 went through at the end of that novel.

The book has a history in the real world. The author Yevgeny Zamyatin was a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1905 and actually served some time in prison. (Historical note this was a different uprising then the more famous 1917 revolt that lead to the Soviet Union.)

As time passed he became disillusioned and wrote "WE" as an anti-communist story. Throughout the twenties Zamyatin was hounded by his peers for not playing follow the literary leader (not writing propaganda). Zamyatin was allowed much to his surprise to leave Russia in 1931 and settled in Paris. Untill his death in '37 he remained an outspoken critic of the Soviet System.

"We" has the advantage of being written with the perspective of someone who actualy helped in a small way bring about, lived during the founding of and later renounce a real world negative utopia.