I remember the horrible creeping feeling of helplessness when reading George Orwell's "1984" in school. It came over me again years later when I read Fred Pohl's "Jem". Many people think that Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" is also a great work of Dystopian fiction. I never got the feeling of helplessness that I got from the others, this might be because I saw the film first or it might be because it is a very derivative work? There is much of this feeling in some of Lem's stories but in them there is also humour and hope, some of them even have a Samizdatz feel to them owing to the way in which they were produced.

Do you have a 'favourite' SF Dystopia? I always feel the Dystopias are more realistic than the Utopias, more attainable somehow.

This is a bit obtuse...

There is--always-- Brave New World. You might also like Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga. His main character takes a look at a utopia and convinces those in charge to dismantle it. By the end of the book, I was agreeing with him.

Anybody ever hear of Samuel Butler's "Erewhon"? The title was an anagram of "nowhere", which in Latin is "Utopia". Butler's novel spoofed the Utopian tradition. In the 20th century Eugene Zamyatin was among the first to create the "Dystopia" with his masterwork "We". Orwell and Huxley followed his lead.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges

tjoeb};>

Tjobigham if we're talking send ups then Dylan Thomas must be No1 with the village of Llareggub in "Under Milk Wood"!

One of the 'better' dystopias features in "Fahrenheit 451" where firemen burn books. I also have a guilty regard for two books based on an obscure tv series called "1990" by Wilfred Greatorex a regretably believable dystopia. Regards, Tin

I don't know whether or not it was a dystopia, but I do recall that the setting of Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" and its sequel "Children of God" was very disturbing and depressing.

I find John Wyndham's work particularly good in this respect. Some of his short stories are set in such sorry and depressing worlds that I become quite fond of this one! His novels too, are often set in real dystopian societies. What makes them all the more horrific is that there is always a hint that these could or would become possible here.