Pollard Memorial Library

Brave New Worlds

If you enjoyed Brave New World, try some of these Utopias, Dystopias, and Near-Future Reads:

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale - An extreme tale of a totalitarian society that dictates gender roles and unites the roles of politics, reproduction, and sexuality.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451 - The title is drawn from the temperature at which paper catches fire. The protagonist is a fireman whose primary duty is to burn books and punish book readers and owners. Eventually he rebels, joins an underground of book lovers and surrenders to his own literary desires. Bradbury's novel raises questions about the extent to which humans can be forced to change, the potential of the human spirit to evade oppressive measures, and the power of words themselves to transcend human boundaries.

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange - A disturbing future society complete with state control, technology, violent gangs, and an exploration of free will, good vs. evil, and alienation.

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey - When a 3-million year old monolith is found buried on the moon, a manned spacecraft with HAL, a psychotic self-aware computer, is sent to investigate. The crew must overthrow HAL if they hope to make their rendezvous with the entities that are responsible not just for the monolith, but maybe even for human civilization.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer - Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price....

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland - On the eve of World War I, an all-female society is discovered somewhere in the distant reaches of the earth by three male explorers who are now forced to re-examine their assumptions about women's roles in society.

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies - The stranding and isolation of a group of boys begins with cooperation and survival and leads to savagery and animal instincts in a world without the constraints of human civilization.

Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land - The story of the only survivor of the first manned mission to Mars and his return to Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed - Unwilling to accept that his anarchist world must be separated from the rest of the civilized universe, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, risks his life by traveling to the utopian mother planet of Urras.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver - In a society that has established "sameness" and eliminated memory, one person, the Giver, is the repository of memory for everyone for all time. As the Giver, ages, young Jonas gets the assignment to receive all the memories. Learning about pleasure and pain, love and even death, Jonas begins to question the value of "sameness" and perceive the hypocrisy that surrounds him.

Orwell, George. 1984 – A cautionary tale that envisions the dangers, such as Big Brother, governmental oppression, slavery, and alienation, of a totalitarian communist society.

Plato. The Republic - Presented as a dialogue between Socrates and others, this description of an ideal state divides the citizenry into three classes: guardians, soldiers and workers. It attempts to define justice, find the best form of rule and extols the virtues of temperance and restraint in a just and balanced state where everyone knows his place.


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Last updated February 27, 2003.
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