Start here
The Machine Stops
Forty pages, written in 1909, about people who live alone in hexagonal cells, speak to each other through screens and have stopped going outside. Nothing on this page has aged worse for us and better for the book.
Collection · Curated by Alice
Classic dystopian and utopian novels
- 11
- books to download
- 5
- we cannot serve yet
- 1516–1938
- 422 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
The oldest book on this page was published in 1516 and the newest in 1938. Between them they invented most of what the genre still runs on: the glass city under a single Benefactor, the machine that provides everything until it stops, the sleeper who wakes up in a worse century.
Start with Zamyatin's We. Orwell reviewed it in 1946 and thought Huxley had borrowed from it; Huxley denied it. It is the book both of them were measured against, and it is here in full.
How this list was built
Three rules decide what is on this page.
First: the book has to be in the United States public domain, which is why the two most famous dystopias of the twentieth century are listed further down as titles we cannot serve rather than as downloads.
Second: it has to have contributed something the genre kept — a device, a structure, an argument — and the note on each card says what.
Third: borderline cases stay only if the reason for including them survives being written down. Utopia, Gulliver's Travels and The Island of Doctor Moreau are not dystopias; they are here because dystopia is unthinkable without them, and each card explains why.
Public domain status is for the United States. Dates of entry are calculated as publication plus 95 years, with entry on the 1st of January of the following year, and checked by hand.
Start here
Two books, about 120 pages between them
If you only read two, read these. One is the shortest and most uncomfortable thing on the page; the other is the book the whole genre was measured against for the next fifty years.
The prototype
We
The glass city, the Benefactor and the numbered citizens supplied the grammar later dystopias would reuse. Orwell reviewed it in 1946, two years before he started Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the debt shows.
Before dystopia had a name
None of these four called itself a dystopia — the word was not in general use until the twentieth century. They are here because each one built a piece of the machinery.
Gulliver's Travels
Not a dystopia, and it does not pretend to be. What it hands over is the satirical machinery: invented societies used to indict the reader's own. Dystopia inherited the method and stopped finding it funny.
The Last Man
A plague empties the Earth by 2100. Shelley reaches the end of humanity a century before the genre exists, and does it without a villain: the catastrophe is nobody's fault, which is exactly what makes it modern.
The Time Machine
The Eloi and the Morlocks are not aliens. They are the leisured and the labouring classes of 1895, evolved apart for eight hundred thousand years — the first future built as an argument about the present.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
A borderline case kept for one reason: Moreau's island is a society engineered from nothing, held together by a law its citizens recite aloud to stay human. The method is dystopian even when the setting is not.
Utopias that became warnings
Three books written in good faith as blueprints for a better world. Read them now and the blueprint is the horror.
Utopia
The word starts here, and so does the ambiguity: the island abolishes poverty and keeps slaves. Every dystopia since is an argument with the idea that a perfect society can be designed at all.
Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887
Bellamy meant it as a blueprint: Boston in the year 2000, want abolished, everyone conscripted into an industrial army at twenty-one. Read the conscription chapters today and the utopia turns over without a word being changed.
A Modern Utopia
Wells designs a world state administered by a voluntary elite, the samurai, and files every other human being in a global card index. He believed in it. That is precisely what makes it a warning.
Machines and managed societies
The sleeper awakes
A man sleeps for two centuries and wakes as the richest person alive, in a London of moving walkways where his own fortune has quietly become the state. Wells's most direct sketch of managed capitalism as tyranny.
Anthem
A society that has erased the word "I": the whole novella is written in the first person plural until, at the end, it is not. Whatever you make of Rand's politics, that is the purest dystopian device on this page.
Still under copyright
What we cannot offer yet, and the year we can
These are the books people usually come looking for. We cannot serve them: they are still in copyright in the United States. Here is the year each one becomes free, calculated and checked.
Unlocks January 2028
Brave New World
The other half of the argument that starts with We. Huxley denied having read Zamyatin; Orwell did not believe him.
Unlocks January 2031
It Can't Happen Here
A Senator wins the American presidency on a platform of traditional values and has the country in camps within a year. Written in 1935, in three months.
Unlocks January 2041
Animal Farm
The short one. A fable rather than a dystopia, and the reason Orwell was allowed to write the long one.
Unlocks January 2045
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The book most people are looking for when they land on a page like this. It borrows its skeleton from We, which you can read here today.
Unlocks January 2049
Fahrenheit 451
The last of the canonical five and the furthest away. Until then, The Machine Stops covers a surprising amount of the same ground.