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Looking for dystopias
MKR
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm looking for games, movies, webcomics and other things set in dystopian environments. I've got things like Equilibrium and The Matrix in mind.
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It's great!
That was a fun movie.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Thomas More's Utopia.
1984 by George Orwell.
Fahrenheit 451
The Prisoner tv series
Richard Morgan - gritty cyberpunk-noir dealing pretty heavily with how miserable life is for everyone who isn't obscenely rich and powerful. Some political and economic commentary, mostly along the lines of "man, unchecked capitalism has turned our world into a hellhole." The protagonist of Morgan's three main books is your standard steel-chewing supersoldier mercenary with a traumatic past, but he's made slightly more interesting by his reverence for a revolutionary anarchist demagogue.
Margaret Atwood - bleak near-future visions, written well enough that they usually get filed under Literature rather than Science Fiction/Fantasy. The Handmaid's Tale is a classic: in the future, fertility is way down and religiosity is way up, so women of breeding age are basically forced into patriarchal servitude. Oryx and Crake is more recent, and deals with things like genetic modified organisms and the ever-increasing extent to which corporations assume the responsibilities formerly granted only to governments.
Matthew Stover - might not be your thing (the Earth sections are definitely dystopian, Overworld hews closer to fantasy) but there's a D&D thread on it with summaries of his Acts of Caine novels.
Some other, more obvious choices:
- Fahrenheit 451 (film or book)
- Deus Ex (game)
- Transmetropolitan (comic)
- Blade Runner (film or book)
- Brave New World (book)
- 1984 (book)
- A Clockwork Orange (film or book)
- The Running Man, The Long Walk (book)
- V for Vendetta (comic)
- Gattaca (film)
- Banlieue 13 (film)
- District 9 (film)
Actually I'd argue that any supposedly utopian fiction is dystopian. From the POV of some characters, even The Culture is a dystopia.
If the axes are labelled something like "degree of societal control" (dystopia) and "degree of biological or environmental damage (post-apocalyptic), something like The Road would score very low on dystopia, but very high on post-apocalypse: there basically is no society or control left, so it's not that the world is shitty because of some oppressive regime, it's that the world is shitty because there was a massive nuclear war. Something like The Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, is very high on the dystopian scale, what with the massive patriarchal theocracy and the government cheese and all, but very low on post-apocalysm. Then there's something kind of in the middle, like The Matrix: the virtual world of the Matrix itself is fairly dystopian, but the real world of Zion is post-apocalyptic.
So, OP, what's your pleasure? If you do dig the end-of-the-world routine as well, I'm sure people will have half a hundred new recommendations for you; if your interest is more towards the help-help-I'm-being-oppressed, we can adjust accordingly.
Carriers
The Road
Book of Eli
Serenity (I think it counts, anyhow)
Blade Runner
I thought they were all good (except Carriers, which was more in the "okay/good" category).
Probably Lewis Sinclair's "Babbit"
but they're listening to every word I say
the movie is good, so is the book!
that is all.
Gattaca with Ethan Hawke
City of Lost Children with Ron Pearlman
Alan Moore's V for Vendetta
Richard Bachman/Stephen King's The Running Man
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano
pretty much anything that Philip K. Dick has written
and it's been said but I'll say it again because it has quite possibly the best opening line of any book anywhere ever, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
and and I just want to point out that if you haven't read The Road yet, do it, god that book is so good
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (sort of)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
that fucking oceanic report man.
i sometimes feel we're at least halfway there.
After Dachau by Daniel Quinn
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
All books.
I personally haven't read these yet, but they have been recommended to me. I, too, am venturing into the dystopian genre - more on the books side of things though.
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is both dystopian and if not post-apocalyptic, at least apocalyptic. The Handmaid's Tale by the same author is great too. They turned it into a movie in the nineties but the movie sucks.
but they're listening to every word I say
Canticle is great. I understand why it's considered one of the masterpieces of science fiction.
I was going to suggest Oryx and Crake, but we got that part done already.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, maybe? "Bio-punk" book in the near future where gene-tailored crops are the only edible things that still grow on the entire planet and the corporations target each other's products with specalized plagues to kill off their crops. And it's downhill from there.
Surprised noone mentioned Demolition Man. Movie
Judge Dredd, movie / comic
Akira?, anime
Aeon Flux, anime
Samurai Jack has a couple of scenes with dystopia imagery, anime (lol)
Half Life 2, game
Syndicate / Syndicate Wars, game
Ghost in Shell, anime
Cowboy Bebop?, anime
Ergo Proxy, anime
Escape from New York, Escape from LA, movie
Minority Report, movie
THX 1138, movie
Total Recall, movie
Johnny Mnemonic, movie
I copied some of them from wikipedia regarding movies, games/music/tv, comics.
Alternatively you can just travel to Detroit for some scenery.
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
:rotate:
my favourite dystopian novel
The Aeon Flux shorts were fantastic; I haven't seen much of the series but I was a little disappointed with what I did see. I guess it would have been a difficult thing to transition into a series with plot and dialogue, though.
but the soundtrack!
the soundtrack!
seconds on pretty much everything.
I do think you can have dystopia without having cyberpunk or apocalyptica present; Catch 22, The Mission, and (ironically) Apocalypse Now all offer a sort of localized societal and social breakdown as opposed to global, and things like Martian Chronicles, The Power and The Glory, and most of Haruki Murakami's short stories offer a sort of sidelong glance at the same principles of broken civilizations.
of course, there's always:
I recently purchased this and it isn't terrible so far.
Shadowrun- the SNES/genesis game, i'm not familiar with the tabletop or current-gen ones.
Dystopia- a sort of meh source mod that is very cyberpunk.
Metro 2033
Fallout (any of them)
Bioshock (any of them)
lots of Ayn Rand
lots of Isaac Asimov, including I, Robot
lots of William Gibson
and getting a little more tangential;
lots of Joseph Conrad
lots of HP Lovecraft
lots of Jack London
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