A Clockwork Orange Author Anthony Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopian Novels: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

From Sir Thomas More’s 1516 philo­soph­i­cal nov­el Utopia to Dis­ney’s 2016 adult-friend­ly kids’ movie Zootopia, the genre of the “-top­ia” has been remark­ably durable. Tak­ing Pla­to’s Repub­lic as their mod­el, the first utopi­an fic­tions flour­ished in an opti­mistic age, when polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy imag­ined a per­fect union between gov­ern­ment and sci­ence. Such fic­tion por­trayed most­ly har­mo­nious, high-func­tion­ing civ­i­liza­tions as con­trasts to real, imper­fect societies—and yet, as mod­ern indus­try began to threat­en human well-being and for­mer­ly ide­al­ized forms of gov­ern­ment acquired a tyran­ni­cal hue, the genre began to project into the future not hopes of free­dom, ease, and plen­ty but rather fears of mass suf­fer­ing, impris­on­ment, and mis­rule. In place of utopias, moder­ni­ty gave us dystopias, ter­ri­fy­ing fic­tions of a hell­ish future birthed by war, total­i­tar­i­an rule, gross eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, and mis­ap­plied tech­nolo­gies.

Before John Stu­art Mill coined the word “dystopia” in 1868, pes­simistic post-Enlight­en­ment thinker Jere­my Ben­tham cre­at­ed an ear­li­er, per­haps even scari­er, word, “caco­topia,” the “imag­ined seat of the worst gov­ern­ment.” This was the term favored by Antho­ny Burgess, author of one of the most unset­tling dystopi­an nov­els of the last cen­tu­ry, A Clock­work Orange. Depict­ing a chaot­ic future Eng­land filled with extreme crim­i­nal vio­lence and an unnerv­ing gov­ern­ment solu­tion, the nov­el can be read as either, writes Ted Gioia, “a look into the moral­i­ty of an indi­vid­ual, or as an inquiry into the moral­i­ty of the State.” It seems to me that this dual focus marks a cen­tral fea­ture of much suc­cess­ful dystopi­an fic­tion: despite its thor­ough­ly grim and pes­simistic nature, the best rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the genre present us with human char­ac­ters who have some agency, how­ev­er lim­it­ed, and who can choose to revolt from the oppres­sive con­di­tions (and usu­al­ly fail in the attempt) or to ful­ly acqui­esce and remain com­plic­it.

The rebel­lion of a sin­gle non-con­formist gen­er­al­ly forms the basis of con­flict in dystopi­an fic­tion, as we’ve seen in recent, pop­ulist iter­a­tions like The Hunger Games series and their more deriv­a­tive coun­ter­parts. And yet, in most clas­sic dystopi­an nov­els, the hero remains an anti-hero—or an un-hero, rather: unex­cep­tion­al, unim­por­tant, and gen­er­al­ly unno­ticed until he or she decides to cross a line. A few of Burgess’s own favorites of the genre rough­ly fol­low this clas­sic for­mu­la, includ­ing Orwell’s 1984. In the short list below, Burgess com­ments on five works of dystopi­an fic­tion he held in par­tic­u­lar­ly high regard. Two of them, Aldous Hux­ley’s Island and Rus­sell Hoban’s Rid­dley Walk­er, break the mold, and show us two oppo­site extremes of civ­i­liza­tions per­fect­ed, and com­plete­ly anni­hi­lat­ed, by West­ern progress. Burgess’s first choice, Nor­man Mail­er’s The Naked and the Dead seems not to fit at all, being an account of past atroc­i­ties rather than a spec­u­la­tive look into the future.

Nev­er­the­less, Burgess seems will­ing to stretch the bound­aries of what we typ­i­cal­ly think of as dystopi­an fic­tion in order to include books that offer, as Mail­er’s nov­el has it, “a pre­view of the future.” See Burgess’s picks below, and read excerpts from his com­men­tary on these five nov­els. You can read his full descrip­tions at The Inter­na­tion­al Antho­ny Burgess Foun­da­tion web­site.

• The Naked and the Dead by Nor­man Mail­er

The futil­i­ty of war is well pre­sent­ed. The island to be cap­tured has no strate­gic impor­tance. The spir­it of revolt among the men is stirred by an acci­dent: the patrol stum­bles into a hor­nets’ nest and runs away, drop­ping weapons and equip­ment, the naked leav­ing the dead behind them. An impulse can con­tain seeds of human choice: we have not yet been turned entire­ly into machines. Mailer’s pes­simism was to come lat­er — in The Deer Park and Bar­bary Shore and An Amer­i­can Dream — but here, with men grant­i­ng them­selves the pow­er to opt out of the col­lec­tive sui­cide of war, there is a heart­en­ing vision of hope. This is an aston­ish­ing­ly mature book for a twen­ty-five-year-old nov­el­ist. It remains Mailer’s best, and cer­tain­ly the best war nov­el to emerge from the Unit­ed States.

• Nine­teen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

This is one of the few dystopi­an or caco­topi­an visions which have changed our habits of thought. It is pos­si­ble to say that the ghast­ly future Orwell fore­told has not come about sim­ply because he fore­told it: we were warned in time. On the oth­er hand, it is pos­si­ble to think of this nov­el as less a prophe­cy than the com­ic join­ing togeth­er of two dis­parate things — an image of Eng­land as it was in the imme­di­ate post-war era, a land of gloom and short­ages, and the bizarrely impos­si­ble notion of British intel­lec­tu­als tak­ing over the gov­ern­ment of the coun­try (and, for that mat­ter, the whole of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world).

• Facial Jus­tice by L.P. Hart­ley

Jael 97 is facial­ly over­priv­i­leged: her beau­ty must be reduced to a drab norm. But, like the heroes and hero­ines of all caco­topi­an nov­els, she is an eccen­tric. See­ing for the first time the west tow­er of Ely Cathe­dral, one of the few lofty struc­tures left unflat­tened by the war, she expe­ri­ences a trans­port of ecsta­sy and wish­es to cher­ish her beau­ty. Her revolt against the regime results in no bru­tal reim­po­si­tion of con­for­mi­ty — only in the per­sua­sions of sweet rea­son. This is no Orwellian future. It is a world inca­pable of the dynam­ic of tyran­ny. Even the weath­er is always cool and grey, with no room for either fire or ice. The state mot­to is ‘Every val­ley shall be exalt­ed.’ This is a bril­liant pro­jec­tion of ten­den­cies already appar­ent in the post-war British wel­fare state but, because the book lacks the expect­ed hor­rors of caco­topi­an fic­tion, it has met less appre­ci­a­tion than Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

• Island by Aldous Hux­ley

Nobody is sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly con­di­tioned to be hap­py: this new world is real­ly brave. It has learned a great deal from East­ern reli­gion and phi­los­o­phy, but it is pre­pared to take the best of West­ern sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy and art. The peo­ple them­selves are a sort of ide­al Eurasian race, equipped with fine bod­ies and Hux­leyan brains, and they have read all the books that Hux­ley has read.

All this sounds like an intel­lec­tu­al game, a hope­less dream in a founder­ing world, but Hux­ley was always enough of a real­ist to know that there is a place for opti­mism. Indeed, no teacher can be a pes­simist, and Hux­ley was essen­tial­ly a teacher. In Island the good life is even­tu­al­ly destroyed by a bru­tal, stu­pid, mate­ri­al­is­tic young raja who wants to exploit the island’s min­er­al resources.

• Rid­dley Walk­er by Rus­sell Hoban

Eng­land… after nuclear war, is try­ing to orga­nize trib­al cul­ture after the total destruc­tion of a cen­tral­ized indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion. The past has been for­got­ten, and even the art of mak­ing fire has to be relearned. The nov­el is remark­able not only for its lan­guage but for its cre­ation of a whole set of rit­u­als, myths and poems. Hoban has built a whole world from scratch.

Burgess’s list gives us such a small sam­pling of dystopi­an fic­tion, and with so many clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary exam­ples about, it’s tempt­ing to add to his list (one won­ders why he choos­es Hux­ley’s Island and not Brave New World). There’s no rea­son why we can’t. If you’re so inclined, tell us your favorite dystopi­an nov­els, or films, in the com­ments, with a brief descrip­tion of their mer­its.

H/T to one of our fans on our Face­book page, John B.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness