Dystopias & Dystopians

Dystopia Novels & Dystopian Movies

There are a lot of things in life that I love, but one that sticks out above many others is the dystopia genre. Whether these are dystopian novels or dystopian movies, there is just something about dystopia that I find endlessly fascinating. In my mind, the king of all of these are the post apocalyptic movies, which by their very nature are generally dystopian in nature. Part of it might be the doom and gloom, part of it is that I tend to like genres where the world the story is set in isn't just background, but it actually is almost a living, breathing character that is just as important to the story as any human or mutant.

That doesn't mean I'm a blind sucker. I found parts of Resident Evil: Extinction interesting (mostly because I liked the background of the desert world - very Mad Max like), but overall the movie ticked me off and in the end it was a worthy mindless watch, but in the end it also still sucked. Well such is life. Still, if everyone has a "junk" genre they love, the male version of trashy romance novels, for me it's not the mlitary shoot 'em up in the jungles that were ghost written by the hundreds, but it is apocalypse, post apocalypse, and dystopian. It's my mental junk food.

There are probably a thousand ways I can go with this post, and there are hundreds of movies and/or books that are worth watching in this genre. I can probably make top ten or twelve or fifty lists, but I've already done this in other places, as well, so I'll come back with some top 50 lists later. I guess the biggest thing for this post is just the encouragment of people who haven't read much in this genre to really dive in and find some of the gems.

This page: http://www.squidoo.com/best-dystopian-novels is based on the top 12 dystopian books, with a strong emphasis on diversity of the list. So some readers may love the feminist dystopians written about by Margaret Atwood, while others prefer the political works like The Iron Heel by Jack London or It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Maybe you want the post apocalyptic, or a zombie apocalypse, or modern authors like Terry Brooks have the end of this world as the birth of a new one. Dystopias as false uptopias: some of the best classics of all time fall under this list.

There are many amazing options to dystopian novels and books, so I strongly encourage readers to go around and find the works that really speak to them!