Your Syllabus for: Dystopians

Trying to get back in the swing of doing these again. This week, I'm tackling dystopians. Dystopian can cover a wide range of ideas. I'm sticking to future (in our world) type of settings. So like steampunks that are sort of dystopians or alternate histories such as The Great Library series by Rachel Caine will not be on here (but seriously go read that series, it's awesome). I also won't be including those dystopians that tend to crossover into more sci--fi/fantasy territory such as Endor's Game. Mostly because I'll probably have a syllabus set up for those specific kind of books in the future. I'll be covering classics, YA, and adult dystopians.

First up: Dystopian classics. As I've mentioned, I consider classics to be anything published before 1985. If your book is over 30 years old, still talked about today and still relevant...I consider you a classic. So this covers quite a few books.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

1984 by George Orwell (1949)

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Blade Runner 1: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (1968)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margeret Atwood (1985)

YA/MG Dystopian (note, I'm not including all YA dystopians. Not all YA dystopians are created equal and frankly this list would get out of control if I did that). Stuff like Shatter Me or Gone where people get powers or whatnot are not going to be included here. That's more into sci-fi/fantasy territory in my opinion.

The Giver series by Lois Lowry (1993)

Feed by M. T. Anderson (2002)

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (2004)

Uglies series by Scott Westerfield (2005)

Last Survivors series by Susan Beth Pfeffer (2006)

Unwind series by Neal Shusterman (2007)

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008)

Maze Runner Trilogy (probably more series now) by James Dashner (2009)

Ship Breaker series by Paolo Bacigalupi

Insiders series by Maria V. Snyder (2010)

Legend Trilogy by Marie Lu (2011)

Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver (2011)

Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth (2011)

Dustlands Trilogy by Moira Young (2011)

All These Things I've Done trilogy by Gabrielle Zevin (2011)

Article 5 Trilogy by Kristen Simmons (2012)

Vivian Apple Duology by Katie Coyle (2013)

Adult Dystopian

The Children of Men by P. D. James (1992)

Earthseed series by Octavia Butler (1993)

MaddAddam Trilogy by Margeret Atwood (2003)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013)

The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (2014)

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)