The best dystopian books that could actually happen

I read this book relatively recently, not at school or when I was in my twenties, but when I was in my late thirties. I had heard of the novel, and the concept of burning books was all-too familiar as I studied a module on Holocaust literature at university. However, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s novel, written in 1953, was so simple yet so powerful.

It echoes with our own reality today, as although books are not being burned, we are seeing the art of writing itself being "burned" or minimized by tools such as AI or social media. The virtual burning of honest reportage or poetry for opinionated views and algorithms is one symptom of today’s fast-paced society. 

There were some great quotes in Fahrenheit 451, too; the one that really stuck out was, “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies… A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted.”

This is actually a children’s novel that I first read at school, and it had a big impact on me. It’s not so well known, and there are other books called "The Guardians", so don’t get confused. This novel was written in 1970 and is set in the not-so-distant 2050.

The world that John Christopher created for this novel really captured my imagination, the difference between the overpopulated "Conurbs" (from conurbation) and the privileged "County" (a land of rolling hills and manor houses).

It’s not too far-fetched, and I think that’s why it spoke to me, as I could easily envisage the world of 13-year-old Rob Randall, who dreamed of escaping the state boarding school in the Conurbs to go to the County. Rob doesn’t fit in and digs a hole under the Barrier that separates the two worlds.

Ok, so I’m probably not the first author to cite 1984 as a major influence, but I do recall reading this–the ultimate dystopian novel–while I was commuting to and from work on the London Underground (The Tube). And reading about Doublespeak and Big Brother seemed all too familiar to me as a young man living in London.

At the time, I recall saying to friends the book should have been called 2004, not 1984, because in 2004, there were more CCTV cameras in London than in any other city, the free newspapers were obsessed with the War on Terror, WMDs and the escapism of drunk celebs.

Basically I felt like I was living in Orwell’s 1984 while reading it, which made it a strange, often eye-opening account.   

Another classic dystopian novel, The Trial, is also something that could easily happen. Kafka’s timeless character, K, wakes up one morning and is simply arrested for an unknown reason. K spends the rest of the novel trying to decipher what happened in a world of endless bureaucracy.

Although I haven’t been arrested, I can definitely identify with the sometimes ludicrous measures we go through for bureaucracy. When I moved to Tel Aviv, I had to fill out seemingly endless forms over and over again, go to offices that were only open for a few hours a day, and stand in queues for a stamp or whatever.

K’s struggle is also a kind of dark prophecy of the Holocaust and persecution of the Jews which starts with innocuous measures like wearing star badges and ends with mass murder. Sadly, this is also too close to today’s world.

I admit that Huxley’s final novel is a rather difficult one to read. It’s long, it goes on too long in some places, it’s kind of fiction and philosophy together, and it includes a book within a book. However, The Island is a work of genius.

There’s the utopian island of Pala (not dystopian), and all through the book, there’s the threat of the invading Rendang kingdom. It includes some Buddhist ideas with the birds on the island that say karuna (meaning compassion) and "attention" to remind islanders of the now, yet ultimately, in the end, the island is invaded, and the utopia becomes exposed as a fake.