26 books in this genre
The largest shelf in the library, built around designed societies and the people who have to live inside them. The classic dystopias are here, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale among them, together with Ursula K. Le Guin's two great thought experiments, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Some reviews follow a collapse and what grows after it, as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Blindness and Station Eleven do. Others study orders engineered on purpose, from the desert politics of Dune to Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, where a government reshapes a people by changing their language.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.A Canticle for LeibowitzTed Gioia on the reader backlash that followed a Harper's critic dismissing Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz on the strength of its first line.→Anthony BurgessA Clockwork OrangeWhy is British literary fiction so violent. We have The Wasp Factory, Crash, The Lord of the Flies, and the most famous of them all, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange→José SaramagoBlindnessJosé Saramago strands a city with an epidemic of blindness. Ted Gioia on how the novel turns the social-collapse story toward something rarer than despair.→Aldous HuxleyBrave New WorldAldous Huxley was an unlikely prophet of dystopia. Ted Gioia on how Brave New World, his fifth novel, made science fiction a serious literary pursuit.→Norman SpinradBug Jack BarronNorman Spinrad managed to bug just about everybody with Bug Jack Barron. The book got attacked in Parliament. The Daily Express branded it as filth. Retailer Menzies removed it, and even phoned up its competitor and convinced them to do the same.→Thomas M. DischCamp Concentration"I have a class theory of literature," Disch once explained. "I come from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how good I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from."→Jack VanceDana Gioia on Jack Vance's The Languages of PaoDana Gioia recalls a boyhood spent hunting science fiction on the drugstore racks, and returns as a critic to Jack Vance's own novel The Languages of Pao.→Cory DoctorowDown and Out in the Magic KingdomCory Doctorow wastes no time in shaking up your familiar coordinates in this unconventional novel. In the opening sentence, readers learn about the abolition of work and a cure for death. And it only gets stranger from there.→Frank HerbertDuneInventing a whole planet sounds easier than writing historical fiction. Ted Gioia on why Frank Herbert's Dune proves the opposite about world-building.→Jack VanceEmphyrioJack Vance may have been too much of a perfectionist for genre fiction, taking care in nuances lost to much of the pulp audience, yet limited by the divided literary culture of his day that scorned writers who set stories in outer space.→Ray BradburyFahrenheit 451No book did more to carry Ray Bradbury out of the science fiction ghetto. Ted Gioia on Fahrenheit 451 and its long passage into the literary mainstream.→Roger ZelaznyLord of LightA review of Roger Zelazny’s novel of colonists who rule a planet as the gods of the Hindu pantheon.→Kim Stanley RobinsonRed MarsRed Mars is geologically rich and scientifically informed, but Robinson's approach is essentially ecological. He comprehends that all landscapes are parts of larger systems, and inhabitants shape and give meaning to any terrain.→Emily St. John MandelStation ElevenYou are now entering the genre Twilight Zone, the middle ground between light and shadow, a land of imagination between realism and sci-fi.→Michel HouellebecqSubmissionIf you want a prediction for this afternoon, check out your daily horoscope. But if you need a forecast for thousands of years from now, you have no place to turn except science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy→Gary ShteyngartSuper Sad True Love StoryThe nation's latest marketing campaign is built on the catch phrase: Together We'll Surprise the World! That sounds ominously appropriate for our current day political branding.→Alfred BesterThe Demolished ManImagine a world without murder. Then use it as the setting for a murder mystery.→Ursula K. Le GuinThe DispossessedLe Guin rewrites political science from the perspective of a hippie commune, circa 1967. She has cleaned the place up, put away the tie-dyed shirts and pot brownies, and moved the setting to outer space. But the summer-of-love ambiance is unmistakable.→Joanna RussThe Female ManRuss certainly wants to entertain her readers, but she is even more committed to enlightening them, and that preference is felt on almost every page of The Female Man.→Isaac AsimovThe Foundation TrilogyConceptual Fiction celebrate the great works of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and alternative history. In this installment, Ted Gioia reviews the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov→Margaret AtwoodThe Handmaid's TaleTed Gioia places The Handmaid's Tale beside 1984 and Brave New World, a dystopia of theocratic rule over women, told by Margaret Atwood largely free of cliché.→Ursula K. Le GuinThe Left Hand of DarknessTed Gioia on The Left Hand of Darkness, the Le Guin novel of Genly Ai's mission to the androgynous people of Gethen, and how she won over literary readers.→Philip K. DickThe Man in the High CastleA review of Philip K. Dick’s alternate-history novel of a divided America and the fiction hidden inside it.→Robert HeinleinThe Moon is a Harsh MistressNo matter how hard you try—and some folks have tried awfully hard—you can’t attach a simple label to Robert Heinlein’s sociopolitical views. Remember that this author won medals for fencing as a young man. You don't get those by staying in the same place for very long.→Robert SilverbergThe World InsideIn this dark comic novel about claustrophobia, Robert Silverberg serves up a variant of Winesburg, Ohio set in a 1,000 story skyscraper with one million residents.→Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'oWizard of the CrowOn the last day of 1977, a caravan of police cars and Land Rovers pulled into the Ngugi wa Thiong'o's yard in the middle of the night. A cadre of armed men brandishing rifles, pistols and machine guns stormed his home, searching his library for subversive literature, and taking him off to jail.→