Utopias are, as literature teaches us, those stories in which the world lives in better, more just conditions than we are on a regular basis, and many a writer from Plato to St Augustine of Hyppo to Thomas More regaled the reading public with such texts.
On the other hand, utopias gone bad are called dystopias, and there are such texts that have achieved far more fame and following than their counterparts - to mention only George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I am sure there must have been dystopias written before the 20th century, but the last hundred years have proved to be the most fertile ground for them.
A book which I enjoyed greatly and which is said to have been an inspiration for Orwell is Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book which was promptly banned by the nascent Bolshevik state almost as soon as it appeared in 1921. Orwell's 1984 is darker, tougher than We, but at least he allowed his characters to have names. Zamyatin's are not even people, according to the rules of the One State in which they live, they are ciphers called D-503, O-90 or R-13. In the One State life proceeds in mathematical progression, and imagination is one of the most-feared and despised things that can happen to anyone.
"[...] Mechanisms don't have imaginations.
Have you ever seen an inanely dreaming and distant smile break across the physiognomy of a pump cylinder while it was at work? Have you ever heard of a crane, in the night-time, in the hours allocated for repose, turning over in anguish and sighing?
NO!
[...] But it is not your fault: you are sick. the name of this sickness: Imagination.
This is the worm that gnaws black wrinkles onto your forehead. [...] it is the last barricade on the path to happiness. But be glad: it has been detonated already. The path is clear. The most recent discovery of State Science is the location of the Imagination: the pathetic cerebral nodule in the region of the Pons Varolii. Cauterise this nodule with X-rays three times and you are healed of your imagination.
FOREVER."
I don't want to sound like a trite advert, but I have to say it. If you enjoyed 1984, you will enjoy We.
And while I am on this subject, I have to mention another dystopia, but one of a very different facture: Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole. In this book, a linguist misses a connection on a flight to Helsinki and ends up in a place where everybody speaks, reads and writes in languages he cannot understand and cannot make sense of, in a perpetual state of motion through what must be the busiest metropolis in the world.
They are different books, but it is interesting they have something in common (besides being dystopian): an undercurrent of black humour, of darkest irony and of satire of the most mordant kind.
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