We Rank the 10 Worst Dystopian Worlds in Fiction From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to ‘1984’

The Handmaid’s Tale takes the number-one spot on this list because the fictional world is not only terrifying but could feasibly become a reality at some point in our real future. In the book, fertile women are forced to be surrogate mothers for babies who are born of regularly occurring assault. Infertile women are pushed into slavery. Men rule the community. Are we really too far off?

In the future outlined by the Hunger Games, society is separated into districts. Each district must choose two children to send to a free-for-all murder melee to crown a single victorious champion. It’s meant to remind people of an uprising against the government and squash any compulsion to do it again. Everyone is forced to watch the event on television—so parents, family, and friends must watch their loved ones die once a year and still have to live under a dictatorship. Can you imagine?

If you knew you were going to die when you turned 21, what would you do with your life? This is what the population in Logan’s Run must ask themselves—because when they turn 21, they’ll be killed. No one can live to their full potential and life expectancy. So if you’re anything like me, that means you’d die a drunken college student after a bad breakup. Fun.

Donating organs is a great thing to do for society—unless it’s a society where people are raised to be essentially walking organ donations. In Never Let Me Go, regular citizens are cloned, and the clones are raised in a special boarding school. They donate vital organs one by one until they “complete,” which is the book’s term for dying. The students at the school ultimately accept their fate, one they cannot escape. Living in this world would mean not only recognizing that you won’t live long but also undergoing the agony of living with missing organs.

Big Brother is watching. And in 1984, Big Brother is also rewriting history, monitoring every second of every day for everyone, and brutally destroying anyone who doesn’t agree with the new system of the world. The lack of privacy and inability to accept others’ differences sounds a lot like… now? Hopefully, since the real world has already blown past that year, 1984 won’t come any closer to reality.

In Parable of the Sower, society has collapsed due to climate change and social inequality. Everyone is fighting for their survival on a dying planet among a dying population. The main character, Lauren, has hyper-empathy and thus can feel everyone’s pain and suffering. She sets out to find a sanctuary and begin her own religion. As if hyper-empathy isn’t difficult enough to deal with, the book is also a terrifying look at what could happen due to climate change and increased class warfare.

OK, so we’re not yet at the extreme level of pandemic they reach in The Stand, a book where a superflu kills almost everyone and the survivors become viciously divided. But we are in a pandemic, and we are pretty intensely divided. So it’s basically just a more serious version of right now, which is bad enough as it is.

In a world where books are banned, and everyone is attached to the television or radio at all times, firefighters have a new job: They burn books, starting fires instead of putting them out. In Fahrenheit 451, anyone found with a book is arrested, and the book (and sometimes the whole house) is incinerated. Can you imagine a world without books? How boring—and terrifying!–would that be?

At first glance, the utopia in Brave New World might seem idyllic. No disease, no aging, and a constant supply of soma, a drug that induces happiness. But there’s also no emotion and no individuality. It’s an easy life, but it’s blind to the realities of the real world—which means it’s hardly a happy life at all. It’s still low on the ranking, though, because we could sure use a bit of happiness right now.

In Flatland, a math-based novella, everything is two dimensions, and everyone is a shape ranging from a line to a polygon. Other worlds exist with both more and fewer dimensions, but the residents of Flatland are forbidden to speak about them, or else they’ll be imprisoned or murdered. In some ways, living in two dimensions might solve a lot of problems (so long, body dysmorphia!), which is why this takes the lowest spot on the ranking, but society in the novella still struggles with many of the issues we have like gender discrimination, class inequality, and willful ignorance.