No 20 - Dystopian Escapism - a reading list

It is nearly 2022 and the world is still in a COVID dystopia. So what better way to take your mind off work than to read some dystopian fiction?

I have always loved sci-fi and dystopian fiction in particular. It is actually one of the reasons that I choose to train to be a GP. My thinking went something like this, we don’t know what the future holds and there is a good chance that there might be a huge war or environmental disaster, and in that situation then a doctor with generic medical skills and some surival training would probably be the most useful to society. (And a doctor with generic skills might also prove valuable to whatever mafia boss or warlord is running the place and might choose to keep me alive!)

Anyway, I have recently just finished reading Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson and by a lucky coincidence he has written an essay in this week’s Spectator: science-fiction-s-curious-ability-to-predict-the-future

Niall spent 2019 reading dystopian books and wrote this great essay. I have produced the following list based on his recommendations and added a few extra of my own. My plan is to work my way through these in between studying some medicine. Enjoy reading about the end of humanity!

1. Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (Penguin Classics)

2. The Last Man (Oxford World's Classics)

3. The Time Machine: H.G. Wells (Macmillan Collector's Library)

4. The War of the Worlds

5. The Sleeper Awakes

6. We: Yevgeny Zamyatin (Penguin Science Fiction)

7. Haldane's "Daedalus" Revisited

8. Brave New World: Vintage

9. It Can't Happen Here

10. 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin Modern Classics)

11. Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo Modern Classics): Ray Bradbury

12. On the Beach

13. The Drowned World: J.G. Ballard

14. 2001 - A Space Odyssey

15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

16. Stand On Zanzibar (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

17. Slaughterhouse 5, or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-dance with Death

18. Blade Runner: The Final Cut

19. William Gibson Neuromancer Trilogy Collection 4 Books Set Pack Count Zero...

20. The Handmaid's Tale

21. Snow Crash: Neal Stephenson

22. 2066: Red Star Over America

23. Oryx And Crake: Margaret Atwood (The Maddaddam Trilogy)

24. The Plot Against America: Philip Roth

25. The Road

26. The Three-Body Problem: Cixin Liu: 1

27. Hunger Games Trilogy (classic boxed set)

28. The Windup Girl by Bacigalupi. Paolo ( 2010 ) Paperback

29. The Fat Years

30. Pandemic (The Extinction Files): 1

31. Submission: Michel Houellebecq

32. The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

33. Termination Shock