Lauren Olamina, a young black girl afflicted with a painful psychosomatic empathy condition, is forced to flee the gated community in which her family eked out a precarious stability. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, 1993Дepicting a Southern California beset by fires, drought, mass unemployment, and the slow collapse of social services, Parable of the Sower brought the ways race, gender, and community could alter survival strategies into the sci-fi imagination. We is worth reading for its genre-pioneering pedigree, but the real star here is ZamyatinвЂ™s hallucinogenic prose - a style he likely developed as a by-product of his alleged synesthesia - which is so vivid and surprising, it keeps the reader pleasantly off-balance. We tells the story of a future in the вЂњOne StateвЂќ in which industrial efficiency is taken to its logical extreme: Humans arenвЂ™t considered people, but ciphers with names like D-503 and I-330, and the world they live in - down to the literal glass apartments they inhabit -В has been mathematically engineered to eliminate unpredictability (donвЂ™t worry, if you fall ill and develop an imagination, an operation can be done to remove it). But both Orwell and Huxley were influenced by an earlier, lesser-known Russian novel, written in 1921, smuggled into the U.S., and published in 1924. Your high-school English teacher probably taught you that 1984 and Brave New World were the pioneers of the sci-fi dystopia. Mann points to the utopian works that have informed many of the books on our list - together, Thomas MoreвЂ™s Utopia (1516), William ShakespeareвЂ™s The Tempest (ca.1612), and Jonathan SwiftвЂ™s GulliverвЂ™s Travels (1726) introduced the dominant forms and themes of the genre, which Mann sums up as: вЂњThe creation of alternate societies through the negation of despised aspects of the real world, the use of social engineering to make people вЂgood,вЂ™ the difficulty of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbarous, the use of frame stories that pretend as if the document you are reading вЂreally happened,вЂ™ the confusion of reality/fiction and truth/lies, the purpose of technology in a perfect society, and the question of who counts as вЂhuman.вЂ™вЂќ These books are all part of the same wary family and, taken as a whole, they provide a look not just at the power of a literary mode, but what we fear we are capable of.Д¬ontributing Authors: Tara Abell, Peter Berard, Tobias Carroll, Maddie Crum, Jason Diamond, Maris Kreizman, Abraham Riesman, Samantha Rollins, Dana Schwartz, Kathryn VanArendonk Illustration by: Francesco Francavilla Heise cites Jean-Baptiste Cousin de GrainvilleвЂ™s The Last Man (1805) as the first end-of-the-world scenario.

That said, weвЂ™ve done our best to also put the spotlight on works from throughout literary history and pay homage to the early influencers. We skew toward the recent, as the term wasnвЂ™t even invented until the 19th century and has only in the last half-century or so come into vogue.

There are some familiar faces, but we also wanted to pluck from unexpected corners: YouвЂ™ll find literary fiction, young-adult works, graphic novels, realist tomes, some books written long ago, and others published in just the last few years. Heise, professors of English at Cornell and UCLA, respectively, both of whom study dystopian literature, and limited our selections to books with some connection to Earth. ItвЂ™s in this spirit that we assembled a group of readers to put together a list of some of the greatest works of dystopian literature, as part of VultureвЂ™s Dark Futures week. They donвЂ™t just appear in the sci-fi section, either - dystopian fiction is firmly ensconced in book-club-ready literary circles, as well. YouвЂ™ll find the classics - your Orwells, Huxleys, and Atwoods - but youвЂ™ll also find a rising crop of new entries into the dystopian canon, from younger authors with fresher concerns about what, precisely, could spell our doom. At every turn in a bookstore aisle, youвЂ™re increasingly likely to stumble across a vision of our world, through the looking glass. We may or may not be living in a dystopian age, but we are certainly living in an age of dystopias.

Stalker of the endless dunes