How I Live Now

The dystopian genre, which is usually a subcategory of science fiction, first emerged as a response to the utopian genre. While utopias feature an idealized vision of society, each dystopian plotline delivers a uniquely flawed and oppressive society—one that is often, but not always, set in a post-apocalyptic future time. Foundational dystopian novels include George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and (arguably) Karel Capek’s War with the Newts. These works explore the various ways in which malignant governments harm the lives of individual citizens.

The thematic concerns of dystopian fiction began to take on an even darker tone in the late 1950s as science fiction writers grappled with the threat of nuclear war. These existential concerns are vividly featured in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz. In the 1970s, writers began to use dystopian fiction to explore more diverse forms of political theory, a pattern that can be seen in the anarcho-syndicalism that dominates Ursula K.